Read The Lovecraft Mythos | Leanpub (2024)

Table of Contents

• • About: H.P. Lovecraft
• The Cthulhu Mythos
  • Azathoth
  • Nyarlathotep
  • The Nameless City
  • The Festival
  • The Hound
  • The Unnamable
  • The Outsider
  • The Lurking Fear
  • The Shunned House
  • The Call of Cthulhu
  • Dagon
  • The Colour out of Space
  • The Dunwich Horror
  • The Whisperer in Darkness
  • The Shadow over Innsmouth
  • The Dreams in the Witch House
  • The Evil Clergyman
  • The Haunter of the Dark
  • The Thing on the Doorstep
  • The Man of Stone
  • The Horror in the Museum
  • Out of the Aeons
  • The Tree on the Hill
  • The Mound
  • The Shadow out of Time
  • At the Mountains of Madness
  • History of the Necronomicon
  • The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
• The Dreamlands Cycles
  • Polaris
  • The Doom That Came to Sarnath
  • The White Ship
  • The Cats of Ulthar
  • Celephaîs
  • Ex Oblivione
  • The Quest of Iranon
  • The Other Gods
  • Hypnos
  • The Strange High House in the Mist
  • The Silver Key
  • The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
  • Through the Gates of the Silver Key
  • Beyond the Wall of Sleep
  • The Statement of Randolph Carter
  • The Descendant
  • The Transition of Juan Romero
  • The Crawling Chaos
• The Extended Mythos
  • Ashes
  • The Challenge from Beyond
• Background information
  • Thematic and stylistic groupings
  • The Lovecraft Universe: Timeline and Key Events
  • Eldritch Horrors: A Guide to Lovecraftian Entities

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American writer of weird, science, fantasy,and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England. After his father’s institutionalization in 1893, he livedaffluently until his family’s wealth dissipated after the death of his grandfather. Lovecraft then lived with his mother, in reduced financialsecurity, until her institutionalization in 1919. He began to write essays for the United Amateur Press Association, and in 1913 wrote a criticalletter to a pulp magazine that ultimately led to his involvement in pulp fiction. He became active in the speculative fiction community and waspublished in several pulp magazines. Lovecraft moved to New York City, marrying Sonia Greene in 1924, and later became the center of a wider groupof authors known as the “Lovecraft Circle”. They introduced him to Weird Tales, which became his most prominent publisher. Lovecraft’s time in NewYork took a toll on his mental state and financial conditions. He returned to Providence in 1926 and produced some of his most popular works,including “The Call of Cthulhu”, At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow over Innsmouth, and The Shadow Out of Time. He remained active as a writerfor 11 years until his death from intestinal cancer at the age of 46.

H.P. Lovecraft’s political and racial opinions, which are evident in some of his writings and personal correspondence, reflect the prejudicedattitudes of his time. His xenophobic and racist views, though not uncommon in the early 20th century, are starkly at odds with contemporary valuesof equality and inclusivity. These aspects of Lovecraft’s worldview can be jarring and uncomfortable for modern readers, highlighting the evolutionof societal norms and the ongoing struggle against bigotry. Despite this, the editors of “The Lovecraft Mythos” have chosen to preserve the originaltexts in their entirety, recognizing their historical significance and the importance of presenting Lovecraft’s work unaltered. This decision allowsreaders to engage with his stories authentically, while also acknowledging the dated and problematic elements within his body of work.

H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” is a cornerstone of modern horror literature, weaving a complex tapestry of cosmic terror that has captivatedreaders for generations. Central to the Mythos is the pantheon of ancient, powerful deities known as the Great Old Ones, with Cthulhu being the mosticonic among them. These entities are depicted as vast, malevolent forces that exist beyond the comprehension of humanity, often lying dormant butcapable of causing untold destruction and madness when awakened. The Mythos is characterized by its themes of existential dread, the insignificanceof humanity in the face of an indifferent cosmos, and the fragility of sanity when confronted with the true nature of the universe.

The stories within the Cthulhu Mythos span a wide range of settings and characters, from the decaying New England towns rife with dark secrets tothe remote corners of the Earth where ancient horrors lurk. Key tales like “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” and “At the Mountains ofMadness” illustrate Lovecraft’s unique blend of science fiction, horror, and mythology. The Mythos also includes a vast array of forbidden texts,such as the infamous Necronomicon, which serve as grim repositories of eldritch knowledge. Lovecraft’s influence extends beyond his own writings,inspiring a myriad of authors who have expanded upon his universe, creating a shared mythos that continues to evolve. Through these interconnectednarratives, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos explores the limits of human understanding and the chilling reality that some mysteries are better leftundiscovered.

List of stories in the Cthulhu Mythos

The stories in the Cthulhu Mythos are not typically ordered by their internal chronology, as Lovecraft’s works do not form a single continuousnarrative. Instead, they are usually listed by their publication date or grouped by thematic relevance.For your reading convenience, the stories in this book are ordered in a way that is more-or-less consistent with the main events in the LovecraftMythos. This ordering places the stories in a sequence that emphasizes their mythos connections and development of key themes and elements withinLovecraft’s universe.

When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities rearedto smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or ofspring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poetssang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when thesethings had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelledout of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.

Of the name and abode of this man but little is written, for they were of thewaking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to know that he dweltin a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, and that he toiled all day among shadowand turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields andgroves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair. From that casem*nt onemight see only walls and windows, except sometimes when one leaned far out and peered aloftat the small stars that passed. And because mere walls and windows must soon drive to madnessa man who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room used night after night to lean outand peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the greyness oftall cities. After years he began to call the slow-sailing stars by name, and to follow themin fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight; till at length his vision opened to manysecret vistas whose existence no common eye suspects. And one night a mighty gulf was bridged,and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher’s window to merge withthe close air of his room and make him a part of their fabulous wonder.

There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dustof gold; vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy with perfumesfrom beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never beholdand having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable deeps. Noiselessinfinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without even touching the body that leanedstiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men’s calendars the tidesof far spheres bare him gently to join the dreams for which he longed; the dreams that men havelost. And in the course of many cycles they tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore;a green shore fragrant with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes.

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The generaltension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and broodingapprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a dangeras may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the peoplewent about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one daredconsciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt wasupon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiverin dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—theautumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe hadpassed 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 couldtell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt whenthey saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-sevencenturies, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands ofcivilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instrumentsof glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences—ofelectricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators awayspeechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to seeNyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hourswere rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been sucha 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 glimmeredon 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, theterrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascinationand 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; that whatwas thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy,and that in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been takenbefore yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathoteplooked on sights which others saw not.

It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowdsto 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 frombehind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against blackness; against the waves ofdestruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, coolingsun. Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood upon end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads. Andwhen I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about“imposture “ and “static electricity”, Nyarlathotep drave us all out,down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that Iwas not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace.We sware to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive; and whenthe electric lights began to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed atthe queer faces we made.

I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when webegan to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary formations and seemed to knowour destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and foundthe blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where thetramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost onits 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 upinto narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared ina narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-chokedsubway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the opencountry, and presently felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out onthe dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicablesnows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glitteringwalls. 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 reverberationsof a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckonedby 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. Asickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastlymidnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel windsthat brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrousthings; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath spaceand reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revoltinggraveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whineof blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable poundingand piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimategods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

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

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate,its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before thefirst stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There isno legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told ofin whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so thatall the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazredthe mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet:

I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the namelesscity, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and wentinto the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other facebears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night-windrattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it lookedat me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert’s heat. And as I returnedits look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for thedawn.

For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and the greyturned to roseal light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring amongthe antique stones though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of the desert still. Then suddenlyabove the desert’s far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstormwhich was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth therecame a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of theNile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to thatunvocal stone place; that place too old for Egypt and Meroë to remember; that place whichI alone of living men had seen.

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

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

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

Very low and sand-choked were all of the dark apertures near me, but I clearedone with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it mighthold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs ofthe race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars,and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures nor frescoes,there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lownessof the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly more than kneel upright; but thearea was so great that my torch shewed only part at a time. I shuddered oddly in some of thefar corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting,and inexplicable nature, and made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequentedsuch a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avid to findwhat the other temples might yield.

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

The moon was gleaming vividly over the primeval ruins, lighting a dense cloudof sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff aheadof me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel, and was about tolead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was nowind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalledthe sudden local winds I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it wasa normal thing. I decided that it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave, and watchedthe troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orificeof a temple a long distance south of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking sand-cloudI plodded toward this temple, which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed adoorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force ofthe icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannilyas it ruffled the sand and spread about the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grewmore and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking amongthe spectral stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as thoughmirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull mythirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber fromwhich it had come.

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

Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame shewed me that for which I hadbeen seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown; and I grewfaint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solidrock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a roughflight of very small, numerous, and steeply descending steps. I shall always see those stepsin my dreams, for I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to callthem steps or mere foot-holds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts,and the words and warnings of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the landsthat men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only a moment beforeadvancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feetfirst, as though on a ladder.

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

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

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

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

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

To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptilekind, with body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more oftennothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximateda small man, and their fore legs bore delicate and evidently flexible feet curiously like humanhands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violatingall known biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared—in one flashI thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bulldog, the mythic Satyr, and the humanbeing. Not Jove himself had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessnessand the alligator-like jaw placed the things outside all established categories. I debated fora time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decidedthey were indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. Tocrown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics,and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals.

The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they heldfirst place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill hadthe artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashionedto suit their dimensions; and I could not but think that their pictured history was allegorical,perhaps shewing the progress of the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself,were to the men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is toa tribe of Indians.

Holding this view, I thought I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of thenameless city; the tale of a mighty sea-coast metropolis that ruled the world before Africarose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept intothe fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, andafterward its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its people—here representedin allegory by the grotesque reptiles—were driven to chisel their way down through therocks in some marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It wasall vividly weird and realistic, and its connexion with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable.I even recognised the passages.

As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later stagesof the painted epic—the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city andthe valley around for ten million years; the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes theirbodies had known so long, where they had settled as nomads in the earth’s youth, hewingin the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they never ceased to worship. Now that thelight was better I studied the pictures more closely, and, remembering that the strange reptilesmust represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many thingswere peculiar and inexplicable. The civilisation, which included a written alphabet, had seeminglyrisen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilisations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yetthere were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent deaths orfuneral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered atthe reticence shewn concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of earthly immortalityhad been fostered as a cheering illusion.

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

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

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

As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightlynoted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance—scenes representingthe nameless city in its heyday, the vegetation of the valley around it, and the distant landswith which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universalprominence, and I wondered that it should be so closely followed in a pictured history of suchimportance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles.I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certainoddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal templesand of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptiledeities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps thevery rites had involved a crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however,could easily explain why the level passage in that awesome descent should be as low as the temples—orlower, since one could not even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideousmummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are curious,and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the lastpainting, mine was the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of primordial life.

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

My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the physicalhorror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, milesbelow the world I knew and faced by another world of eerie light and mist, could match the lethaldread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast thatmeasurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples in thenameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes shewed oceans andcontinents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely familiar outline. Ofwhat could have happened in the geological aeons since the paintings ceased and the death-hatingrace resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these cavernsand in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled to thinkof the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silent and deserted vigil.

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

More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night-wind into that gulfof the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of beingswept bodily through the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected,and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a thousandnew terrors of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incrediblefancies; once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only other human image in that frightfulcorridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing ofthe swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it waslargely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the last—I was almost mad—butif I did so my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried tocrawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushedslowly and inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped, forI fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamedof the nameless city:

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

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

And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-peopled blackness ofearth’s bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shutwith a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant worldto hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.

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

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their heartsit 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 inthe elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keepfestival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Minewere 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 gardensof 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 couldunderstand. 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 thegloaming; 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; ceaselessmazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child’s disorderedblocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlightsand small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaicstars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out ofwhich 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 thesnow 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. Theyhad 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 ofa village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of the season, and felt that theseold Puritan folk might well have Christmas customs strange to me, and full of silent hearthsideprayer. So after that I did not listen for merriment or look for wayfarers, but kept on downpast the hushed lighted farmhouses and shadowy stone walls to where the signs of ancient shopsand sea-taverns creaked in the salt breeze, and the grotesque knockers of pillared doorwaysglistened 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 hastenedthrough Back Street to Circle Court, and across the fresh snow on the one full flagstone pavementin the town, to where Green Lane leads off behind the Market house. The old maps still heldgood, and I had no trouble; though at Arkham they must have lied when they said the trolleysran 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 GreenLane, with an ancient peaked roof and jutting second story, all built before 1650.

There were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw from thediamond window-panes that it must have been kept very close to its antique state. The upperpart overhung the narrow grass-grown street and nearly met the overhanging part of the houseopposite, 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 withiron railings. It was an odd scene, and because I was strange to New England I had never knownits like before. Though it pleased me, I would have relished it better if there had been footprintsin 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 beengathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my heritage, and the bleakness of theevening, and the queerness of the silence in that aged town of curious customs. And when myknock was answered I was fully afraid, because I had not heard any footsteps before the doorcreaked open. But I was not afraid long, for the gowned, slippered old man in the doorway hada bland face that reassured me; and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote a quaintand ancient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried.

He beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed rafters anddark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past was vivid there, for notan attribute was missing. There was a cavernous fireplace and a spinning-wheel at which a bentold woman in loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently spinning despitethe festive season. An indefinite dampness seemed upon the place, and I marvelled that no fireshould be blazing. The high-backed settle faced the row of curtained windows at the left, andseemed to be occupied, though I was not sure. I did not like everything about what I saw, andfelt again the fear I had had. This fear grew stronger from what had before lessened it, forthe 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 like wax. Finally I was sure it was not a face atall, but a fiendishly cunning mask. But the flabby hands, curiously gloved, wrote genially onthe tablet and told me I must wait a while before I could be led to the place of 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 includedold Morryster’s wild Marvells of Science, the terrible Saducismus Triumphatusof Joseph Glanvill, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreia of Remigius, printedin 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab AbdulAlhazred, 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 thecreaking of signs in the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as the bonneted old woman continuedher silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the books and the people very morbid anddisquieting, 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 absorbedby something I found in that accursed Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideousfor sanity or consciousness. But I disliked it when I fancied I heard the closing of one ofthe windows that the settle faced, as if it had been stealthily opened. It had seemed to followa 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 Ilost the feeling that there were persons on the settle, and was reading intently and shudderinglywhen the old man came back booted and dressed in a loose antique costume, and sat down on thatvery bench, so that I could not see him. It was certainly nervous waiting, and the blasphemousbook in my hands made it doubly so. When eleven struck, however, the old man stood up, glidedto a massive carved chest in a corner, and got two hooded cloaks; one of which he donned, andthe other of which he draped round the old woman, who was ceasing her monotonous spinning. Thenthey both started for the outer door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after pickingup the very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his hood over that unmoving faceor mask.

We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly ancienttown; went out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared one by one, and the Dog Starleered at the throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway andformed monstrous processions up this street and that, past the creaking signs and antediluviangables, the thatched roofs and diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decayinghouses overlapped and crumbled together, gliding across open courts and churchyards where thebobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.

Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by elbowsthat seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and stomachs that seemed abnormallypulpy; but seeing never a face and hearing never a word. Up, up, up the eerie columns slithered,and I saw that all the travellers were converging as they flowed near a sort of focus of crazyalleys 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 ithad 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 spectralshafts, and partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of snow by the wind, and lined withunwholesomely archaic houses having peaked roofs and overhanging gables. Death-fires dancedover the tombs, revealing gruesome vistas, though queerly failing to cast any shadows. Pastthe churchyard, where there were no houses, I could see over the hill’s summit and watchthe glimmer of stars on the harbour, though the town was invisible in the dark. Only once ina while a lanthorn bobbed horribly through serpentine alleys on its way to overtake the throngthat was now slipping speechlessly into the church. I waited till the crowd had oozed into theblack doorway, and till all the stragglers had followed. The old man was pulling at my sleeve,but I was determined to be the last. Then I finally went, the sinister man and the old spinningwoman before me. Crossing the threshold into that swarming temple of unknown darkness, I turnedonce to look at the outside world as the churchyard phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on thehill-top 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 seemedto 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, formost of the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up the aisle between the high whitepews to the trap-door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit, andwere now squirming noiselessly in. I followed dumbly down the footworn steps and into the dank,suffocating crypt. The tail of that sinuous line of night-marchers seemed very horrible, andas I saw them wriggling into a venerable tomb they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticedthat the tomb’s floor had an aperture down which the throng was sliding, and in a momentwe were all descending an ominous staircase of rough-hewn stone; a narrow spiral staircase dampand peculiarly odorous, that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill past monotonouswalls of dripping stone blocks and crumbling mortar. It was a silent, shocking descent, andI observed after a horrible interval that the walls and steps were changing in nature, as ifchiselled out of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad footfalls madeno sound and set up no echoes. After more aeons of descent I saw some side passages or burrowsleading from unknown recesses of blackness to this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they becameexcessively numerous, like impious catacombs of nameless menace; and their pungent odour ofdecay grew quite unbearable. I knew we must have passed down through the mountain and beneaththe earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should be so aged and maggoty withsubterraneous evil.

Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious lappingof 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 andthe 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 fungousshore litten by a belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river thatflowed 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 blazingpillar. It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of thesolstice and of spring’s promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, lightand 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 greenin the chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw something amorphously squatted far away from thelight, piping noisomely on a flute; and as the thing piped I thought I heard noxious muffledflutterings in the foetid darkness where I could not see. But what frightened me most was thatflaming column; spouting volcanically from depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadowsas healthy flame should, and coating the nitrous stone above 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 hideousflame, and made stiff ceremonial motions to the semicircle he faced. At certain stages of theritual they did grovelling obeisance, especially when he held above his head that abhorrentNecronomicon he had taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances because I had beensummoned to this festival by the writings of my forefathers. Then the old man made a signalto the half-seen flute-player in the darkness, which player thereupon changed its feeble droneto a scarce louder drone in another key; precipitating as it did so a horror unthinkable andunexpected. At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread notof this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.

Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that coldflame, out of the Tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, andunsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things thatno sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogethercrows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; butsomething I cannot and must not recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feetand half with their membraneous wings; and as they reached the throng of celebrants the cowledfigures seized and mounted them, and rode off one by one along the reaches of that unlightedriver, into pits and galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful and undiscoverablecataracts.

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

Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family resemblancein his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the face was merely a devilish waxenmask. The flopping animals were now scratching restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that theold 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 maskfrom what should have been his head. And then, because that nightmare’s position barredme from the stone staircase down which we had come, I flung myself into the oily undergroundriver that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea; flung myself into that putrescent juiceof earth’s inner horrors before the madness of my screams could bring down upon me allthe charnel legions these pest-gulfs might conceal.

At the hospital they told me I had been found half frozen in Kingsport Harbourat dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to save me. They told me I had takenthe 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 everythingwas wrong. Everything was wrong, with the broad window shewing a sea of roofs in which onlyabout one in five was ancient, and the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below. Theyinsisted that this was Kingsport, and I could not deny it. When I went delirious at hearingthat the hospital stood near the old churchyard on Central Hill, they sent me to St. Mary’sHospital 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’sobjectionable Necronomicon from the library of Miskatonic University. They said somethingabout a “psychosis”, and agreed I had better get any harassing obsessions off mymind.

So I read again that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was indeednot new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what they might; and where it was Ihad seen it were best forgotten. There was no one—in waking hours—who could remindme of it; but my dreams are filled with terror, because of phrases I dare not quote. I darequote 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 ofeyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughtslive new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabaosay, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizardsare all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from hischarnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruptionhorrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrousto plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, andthings have learnt to walk that ought to crawl. “

I.

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—fortoo 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 Ishall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasysweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.

May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrousa fate! Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where even the joys of romance andadventure soon grow stale, St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic andintellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of theSymbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each newmood was drained too soon of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the sombre philosophy ofthe Decadents could hold us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depthand diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, tillfinally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiencesand adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestablecourse which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity—that hideous extremityof human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue evenpartly the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the great stonehouse where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkableplace, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terrorand decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far, far underground; wherehuge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird greenand orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death thelines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipescame at will the odours our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies, sometimesthe narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes—howI 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 alternatingwith comely, life-like bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist’s art, andwith headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and there containedskulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one mightfind the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads ofnew-buried children. Statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executedby St. John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknownand unnamable drawings which it was rumoured Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St. John andI sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness; whilstin a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable varietyof tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. It is of this loot in particularthat I must not speak—thank God I had the courage to destroy it long before I thoughtof destroying myself.

The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasureswere always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certainconditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes wereto us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidioustechnical care. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation ofthe damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed theexhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the earth. Our quest for novel scenes and piquantconditions was feverish and insatiate—St. John was always the leader, and he it was wholed the way at last to that mocking, that accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitabledoom.

By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard?I think it was the dark rumour and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, whohad 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 neglectedgrass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew againstthe moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescentinsects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odours of mould,vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over farswamps and seas; and worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound whichwe 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 foundin this selfsame spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.

I remembered how we delved in this ghoul’s grave with our spades, andhow we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horribleshadows, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires,the sickening odours, the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, half-heard, directionlessbaying, of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure. Then we struck a substance harderthan the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from thelong undisturbed ground. It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we finally priedit open and feasted our eyes on what it held.

Much—amazingly much—was left of the object despite the lapse offive hundred years. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that hadkilled it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skulland its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever likeour own. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently beenworn around the sleeper’s neck. It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouchingwinged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in antique Orientalfashion from a small piece of green jade. The expression on its features was repellent in theextreme, savouring at once of death, bestial*ty, and malevolence. Around the base was an inscriptionin characters which neither St. John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a maker’sseal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; thatthis treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Even had its outlines beenunfamiliar we would have desired it, but as we looked more closely we saw that it was not whollyunfamiliar. Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know,but we recognised it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the madArab 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 Arabdaemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of thesouls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.

Seizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-eyedface of its owner and closed up the grave as we found it. As we hastened from that abhorrentspot, the stolen amulet in St. John’s pocket, we thought we saw the bats descend in abody 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 thenext day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard the faint distant baying of somegigantic hound in the background. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and we could not besure.

II.

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 ancientmanor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by theknock of the visitor. Now, however, we were troubled by what seemed to be frequent fumblingsin 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 shiningagainst it, and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. Oneach occasion investigation revealed nothing, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imaginationalone—that same curiously disturbed imagination which still prolonged in our ears thefaint far baying we thought we had heard in the Holland churchyard. The jade amulet now reposedin a niche in our museum, and sometimes we burned strangely scented candles before it. We readmuch in Alhazred’s Necronomicon about its properties, and about the relation ofghouls’ souls to the objects it symbolised; and were disturbed by what we read. Then terrorcame.

On the night of September 24, 19—, I heard a knock at my chamberdoor. Fancying it St. John’s, I bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by a shrilllaugh. There was no one in the corridor. When I aroused St. John from his sleep, he professedentire ignorance of the event, and became as worried as I. It was that night that the faint,distant baying over the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality. Four days later, whilstwe were both in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the single doorwhich led to the secret library staircase. Our alarm was now divided, for besides our fear ofthe 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 wefelt an unaccountable rush of air, and heard as if receding far away a queer combination ofrustling, tittering, and articulate chatter. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses,we did not try to determine. We only realised, with the blackest of apprehensions, that theapparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language.

After that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Mostly we held to thetheory that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but sometimesit pleased us more to dramatise ourselves as the victims of some creeping and appalling doom.Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Our lonely house was seemingly alivewith the presence of some malign being whose nature we could not guess, and every night thatdaemoniac baying rolled over the windswept moor, always louder and louder. On October 29 wefound in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossibleto describe. They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats which haunted the old manor-housein unprecedented and increasing numbers.

The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St. John, walking homeafter dark from the distant railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thingand torn to ribbons. His screams had reached the house, and I had hastened to the terrible scenein time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the risingmoon. My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and he could not answer coherently. All he coulddo 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 mumbledover his body one of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. And as I pronounced the lastdaemoniac sentence I heard afar on the moor the faint baying of some gigantic hound. The moonwas up, but I dared not look at it. And when I saw on the dim-litten moor a wide nebulous shadowsweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. WhenI arose trembling, I know not how much later, I staggered into the house and made shocking obeisancesbefore the enshrined amulet of green jade.

Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor, I departedon the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burialthe rest of the impious collection in the museum. But after three nights I heard the bayingagain, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark. One eveningas I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I saw a black shape obscure one ofthe reflections of the lamps in the water. A wind stronger than the night-wind rushed by, andI 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; butI felt that I must at least try any step conceivably logical. What the hound was, and why itpursued 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 thecurse with the stealing of the amulet. Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despairwhen, at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole meansof salvation.

The baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a nameless deedin the vilest quarter of the city. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement hadfallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the neighbourhood. In a squalid thieves’den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and thosearound had heard all night above the usual clamour of drunken voices a faint, deep, insistentnote as of a gigantic hound.

So at last I stood again in that unwholesome churchyard where a pale wintermoon cast hideous shadows, and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frostygrass 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 wasvery 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 aroundit.

I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas andapologies to the calm white thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I attacked the half-frozensod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a dominating will outside myself. Excavationwas much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; whena lean vulture darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave-earth untilI killed him with a blow of my spade. Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed thedamp nitrous cover. This is the last rational act I ever performed.

For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmareretinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not cleanand placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh andhair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawningtwistedly 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 thelost and fateful amulet of green jade, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screamssoon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.

Madness rides the star-wind . . . claws and teeth sharpenedon centuries of corpses . . . dripping death astride a Bacchanale of bats fromnight-black ruins of buried temples of Belial. . . . Now, as the baying of thatdead, fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flappingof those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivionwhich is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.

We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumnday at the old burying-ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. Looking towardthe giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly engulfed an ancient,illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and unmentionable nourishmentwhich the colossal roots must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chidedme for such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a century,nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides,he added, my constant talk about “unnamable” and “unmentionable” thingswas a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fondof ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties and leftthem without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things,he said, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossibleto refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitionsof fact or the correct doctrines of theology—preferably those of the Congregationalists,with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.

With this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was principalof the East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England’s self-satisfieddeafness to the delicate overtones of life. It was his view that only our normal, objectiveexperiences possess any aesthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist notso much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placidinterest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of every-day affairs. Especiallydid he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believingin the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit that it is sufficiently commonplacefor literary treatment. That a mind can find its greatest pleasure in escapes from the dailytreadmill, and in original and dramatic recombinations of images usually thrown by habit andfatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something virtually incredibleto 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 holdsvisions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believedhimself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experiencedand 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 realised the futility of imaginative and metaphysical argumentsagainst the complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of this afternooncolloquy moved me to more than usual contentiousness. The crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchaltrees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of the witch-haunted old town that stretched around,all combined to rouse my spirit in defence of my work; and I was soon carrying my thrusts intothe enemy’s own country. It was not, indeed, difficult to begin a counter-attack, forI knew that Joel Manton actually half clung to many old-wives’ superstitions which sophisticatedpeople had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying persons at distant places, andin 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 existenceof 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 mancan transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of thecenturies, 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 sincespirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by anyof the laws of matter; why is it extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes—orabsences 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 confidencein his own opinions which had doubtless caused his success as a teacher; whilst I was too sureof my ground to fear defeat. The dusk fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some of the distantwindows, but we did not move. Our seat on the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that myprosaic friend would not mind the cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed brickwork closebehind us, or the utter blackness of the spot brought by the intervention of a tottering, desertedseventeenth-century house between us and the nearest lighted road. There in the dark, upon thatriven tomb by the deserted house, we talked on about the “unnamable”, and aftermy friend had finished his scoffing I told him of the awful evidence behind the story at whichhe had scoffed the most.

My tale had been called “The Attic Window”, and appeared in theJanuary, 1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and thePacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops; butNew 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 thosecrazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaoticMagnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly authenticated that even he had not venturedto name the locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jottingof the old mystic—that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notionalscribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalistwould think of having it grow up, look into people’s windows at night, and be hidden inthe attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries laterand couldn’t describe what it was that turned his hair grey. 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 inan old diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile from wherewe were sitting; that, and the certain reality of the scars on my ancestor’s chest andback which the diary described. I told him, too, of the fears of others in that region, andhow they were whispered down for generations; and how no mythical madness came to the boy whoin 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be there.

It had been an eldritch thing—no wonder sensitive students shudder atthe Puritan age in Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the surface—solittle, 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 crushedbrains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty; no freedom—we can see that fromthe architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. Andinside that rusted iron strait-jacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism.Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.

Cotton Mather, in that daemoniac sixth book which no one should read afterdark, minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Stern as a Jewish prophet, and laconicallyunamazed as none since his day could be, he told of the beast that had brought forth what wasmore than beast but less than man—the thing with the blemished eye—and of the screamingdrunken wretch that they hanged for having such an eye. This much he baldly told, yet withouta 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 aboutthe lock on the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless, broken, embittered oldman who had put up a blank slate slab by an avoided grave, although one may trace enough evasivelegends to curdle the thinnest blood.

It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtivetales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows nearthe woods. Something had caught my ancestor on a dark valley road, leaving him with marks ofhorns on his chest and of ape-like claws on his back; and when they looked for prints in thetrampled dust they found the mixed marks of split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws. Once apost-rider said he saw an old man chasing and calling to a frightful loping, nameless thingon Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before dawn, and many believed him. Certainly, therewas strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken old man was buried in the cryptbehind 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 whisperedand shivered; and hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they stopped hopingwhen the horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece. With theyears the legends take on a spectral character—I suppose the thing, if it was a livingthing, must have died. The memory had lingered hideously—all the more hideous becauseit was so secret.

During this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw thatmy words had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite seriously about theboy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably been the hero of my fiction. I told him whythe 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 boyhad gone to look at the windows of that horrible attic, because of tales of things seen behindthem, and had come back screaming maniacally.

Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his analyticalmood. He granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really existed, butreminded me that even the most morbid perversion of Nature need not be unnamable or scientificallyindescribable. I admired his clearness and persistence, and added some further revelations Ihad collected among the old people. Those later spectral legends, I made plain, related to monstrousapparitions more frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of gigantic bestial formssometimes visible and sometimes only tangible, which floated about on moonless nights and hauntedthe old house, the crypt behind it, and the grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegibleslab. Whether or not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as told inuncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent impression; and were yetdarkly feared by very aged natives, though largely forgotten by the last two generations—perhapsdying for lack of being thought about. Moreover, so far as aesthetic theory was involved, ifthe psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representationcould express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the spectre of a malign, chaoticperversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature? Moulded by the dead brain of a hybridnightmare, 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 brushedby me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I felt him raisehis 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 thatboy saw—if he was sensitive he wouldn’t have needed anything in the window-glassto unhinge him. If they all came from the same object it must have been an hysterical, deliriousmonstrosity. It would have been blasphemous to leave such bones in the world, so I went backwith a sack and took them to the tomb behind the house. There was an opening where I could dumpthem in. Don’t think I was a fool—you ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inchhorns, 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 theother there was not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures. They were that kind—theold lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. I don’t believe they’ve hadany glass for an 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 withoutan 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 ofharmless theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried out with a sortof gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression. It was an odd cry, and all themore terrible because it was answered. For as it was still echoing, I heard a creaking soundthrough the pitchy blackness, and knew that a lattice window was opening in that accursed oldhouse beside us. And because all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it wasthe grisly glassless frame of that daemoniac 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 unseenentity of titanic size but undetermined nature; knocked sprawling on the root-clutched mouldof that abhorrent graveyard, while from the tomb came such a stifled uproar of gasping and whirringthat my fancy peopled the rayless gloom with Miltonic legions of the misshapen damned. Therewas a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of loose bricks and plaster; butI had mercifully fainted before I could learn what it meant.

Manton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes atalmost the same instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were side by side, and weknew in a few seconds that we were in St. Mary’s Hospital. Attendants were grouped aboutin tense curiosity, eager to aid our memory by telling us how we came there, and we soon heardof the farmer who had found us at noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from theold burying-ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood. Mantonhad two malignant wounds in the chest, and some less severe cuts or gougings in the back. Iwas not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and contusions of the most bewilderingcharacter, including the print of a split hoof. It was plain that Manton knew more than I, buthe told nothing to the puzzled and interested physicians till he had learned what our injurieswere. Then he said we were the victims of a vicious bull—though the animal was a difficultthing to place and account for.

After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck 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—agelatin—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!”

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is hewho looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddeningrows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumberedtrees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me—tome, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content, andcling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyondto 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 accursedsmell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations. It was never light, so thatI used sometimes to light candles and gaze steadily at them for relief; nor was there any sunoutdoors, since the terrible trees grew high above the topmost accessible tower. There was oneblack tower which reached above the trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruinedand 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 caredfor my needs, yet I cannot recall any person except myself; or anything alive but the noiselessrats and bats and spiders. I think that whoever nursed me must have been shockingly aged, sincemy first conception of a living person was that of something mockingly like myself, yet distorted,shrivelled, and decaying like the castle. To me there was nothing grotesque in the bones andskeletons that strowed some of the stone crypts deep down among the foundations. I fantasticallyassociated these things with every-day events, and thought them more natural than the colouredpictures of living beings which I found in many of the mouldy books. From such books I learnedall that I know. No teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voicein all those years—not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thoughtto try to speak aloud. My aspect was a matter equally unthought of, for there were no mirrorsin the castle, and I merely regarded myself by instinct as akin to the youthful figures I sawdrawn 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 forhours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds inthe sunny world beyond the endless forest. Once I tried to escape from the forest, but as Iwent 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. Thenin the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, andI lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest intothe unknown outer sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; sinceit 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 wherethey ceased, and thereafter clung perilously to small footholds leading upward. Ghastly andterrible was that dead, stairless cylinder of rock; black, ruined, and deserted, and sinisterwith startled bats whose wings made no noise. But more ghastly and terrible still was the slownessof my progress; for climb as I might, the darkness overhead grew no thinner, and a new chillas of haunted and venerable mould assailed me. I shivered as I wondered why I did not reachthe light, and would have looked down had I dared. I fancied that night had come suddenly uponme, 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 attained.

All at once, after an infinity of awesome, sightless crawling up that concave and desperateprecipice, I felt my head touch a solid thing, and I knew I must have gained the roof, or atleast some kind of floor. In the darkness I raised my free hand and tested the barrier, findingit stone and immovable. Then came a deadly circuit of the tower, clinging to whatever holdsthe slimy wall could give; till finally my testing hand found the barrier yielding, and I turnedupward 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 forthe nonce ended; since the slab was the trap-door of an aperture leading to a level stone surfaceof greater circumference than the lower tower, no doubt the floor of some lofty and capaciousobservation chamber. I crawled through carefully, and tried to prevent the heavy slab from fallingback into place; but failed in the latter attempt. As I lay exhausted on the stone floor I heardthe eerie echoes of its fall, but hoped when necessary to pry it open again.

Believing I was now at a prodigious height, far above the accursed branches of the wood, I draggedmyself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows, that I might look for the first timeupon 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 disturbingsize. More and more I reflected, and wondered what hoary secrets might abide in this high apartmentso 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; butwith a supreme burst of strength I overcame all obstacles and dragged it open inward. As I didso there came to me the purest ecstasy I have ever known; for shining tranquilly through anornate grating of iron, and down a short stone passageway of steps that ascended from the newlyfound doorway, was the radiant full moon, which I had never before seen save in dreams and invague visions I dared not call memories.

Fancying now that I had attained the very pinnacle of the castle, I commenced to rush up thefew 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—whichI tried carefully and found unlocked, but which I did not open for fear of falling from theamazing height to which I had climbed. Then the moon came out.

Most daemoniacal 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 bizarremarvels that sight implied. The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it wasmerely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretchedaround me on a level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground, decked anddiversified by marble slabs and columns, and overshadowed by an ancient stone church, whoseruined spire gleamed spectrally in the moonlight.

Half unconscious, I opened the grating and staggered out upon the white gravel path that stretchedaway in two directions. My mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held the frantic cravingfor light; and not even the fantastic wonder which had happened could stay my course. I neitherknew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined togaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost. I knew not who I was or what I was, or what my surroundingsmight be; though as I continued to stumble along I became conscious of a kind of fearsome latentmemory that made my progress not wholly fortuitous. I passed under an arch out of that regionof slabs and columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the visibleroad, but sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where only occasional ruinsbespoke 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 iviedcastle in a thickly wooded park; maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness tome. 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 anddelight were the open windows—gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound ofthe 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 humanspeech before; and could guess only vaguely what was said. Some of the faces seemed to holdexpressions 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 sofrom my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realisation. Thenightmare was quick to come; for as I entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifyingdemonstrations I had ever conceived. Scarcely had I crossed the sill when there descended uponthe whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity, distorting every face andevoking the most horrible screams from nearly every throat. Flight was universal, and in theclamour 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 toescape; overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they managed to reach oneof the many doors.

The cries were shocking; and as I stood in the brilliant apartment alone and dazed, listeningto 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 toward one of the alcovesI thought I detected a presence there—a hint of motion beyond the golden-arched doorwayleading to another and somewhat similar room. As I approached the arch I began to perceive thepresence more clearly; and then, with the first and last sound I ever uttered—a ghastlyululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious cause—I beheld in full,frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which hadby 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 desolation;the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the mercifulearth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world—or no longer of this world—yetto my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travestyon the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilledme even more.

I was almost paralysed, but not too much so to make a feeble effort toward flight; a backwardstumble which failed to break the spell in which the nameless, voiceless monster held me. Myeyes, bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared loathsomely into them, refused to close; thoughthey were mercifully blurred, and shewed the terrible object but indistinctly after the firstshock. I tried to raise my hand to shut out the sight, yet so stunned were my nerves that myarm could not fully obey my will. The attempt, however, was enough to disturb my balance; sothat I had to stagger forward several steps to avoid falling. As I did so I became suddenlyand agonisingly aware of the nearness of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathingI half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to wardoff the foetid apparition which pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishnessand hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneaththe golden arch.

I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the night-wind shrieked for me as inthat same second there crashed down upon my mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilatingmemory. I knew in that second all that had been; I remembered beyond the frightful castle andthe trees, and recognised the altered edifice in which I now stood; I recognised, most terribleof all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingersfrom its own.

But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the supremehorror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanishedin a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ranswiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble andwent down the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hatedthe 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 Hadothby 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 newwildness 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 thiscentury and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingersto the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched acold and unyielding surface of polished glass.

I. The Shadow on the Chimney

There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountainto find the lurking fear. I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that loveof the grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrorsin literature and in life. With me were two faithful and muscular men for whom I had sent whenthe time came; men long associated with me in my ghastly explorations because of their peculiarfitness.

We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who stilllingered 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 themshare the search, that I might not have had to bear the secret alone so long; to bear it alonefor fear the world would call me mad or go mad itself at the daemon implications of the thing.Now that I am telling it anyway, lest the brooding make me a maniac, I wish I had never concealedit. 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 untilthe wooded ascent checked it. The country bore an aspect more than usually sinister as we viewedit by night and without the accustomed crowds of investigators, so that we were often temptedto use the acetylene headlight despite the attention it might attract. It was not a wholesomelandscape after dark, and I believe I would have noticed its morbidity even had I been ignorantof the terror that stalked there. Of wild creatures there were none—they are wise whendeath 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 inthe weedy, fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me of snakes and dead men’s skulls swelledto gigantic proportions.

Fear had lurked on Tempest Mountain for more than a century. This I learnedat once from newspaper accounts of the catastrophe which first brought the region to the world’snotice. The place is a remote, lonely elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilisationonce feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a few ruined mansionsand a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes. Normal beingsseldom visited the locality till the state police were formed, and even now only infrequenttroopers patrol it. The fear, however, is an old tradition throughout the neighbouring villages;since it is a prime topic in the simple discourse of the poor mongrels who sometimes leave theirvalleys to trade hand-woven baskets for such primitive necessities as they cannot shoot, raise,or make.

The lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion, whichcrowned the high but gradual eminence whose liability to frequent thunderstorms gave it thename of Tempest Mountain. For over a hundred years the antique, grove-circled stone house hadbeen the subject of stories incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories of a silent colossalcreeping death which stalked abroad in summer. With whimpering insistence the squatters toldtales of a daemon which seized lone wayfarers after dark, either carrying them off or leavingthem in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment; while sometimes they whispered of blood-trailstoward 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 half-glimpsed fiend; yet not a farmeror villager doubted that the Martense mansion was ghoulishly haunted. Local history forbadesuch a doubt, although no ghostly evidence was ever found by such investigators as had visitedthe building after some especially vivid tale of the squatters. Grandmothers told strange mythsof the Martense spectre; myths concerning the Martense family itself, its queer hereditary dissimilarityof 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 confirmationof the mountaineers’ wildest legends. One summer night, after a thunderstorm of unprecedentedviolence, 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 descendedupon them, and they were not doubted. They had not seen it, but had heard such cries from oneof their hamlets that they knew a creeping death had come.

In the morning citizens and state troopers followed the shuddering mountaineersto the place where they said the death had come. Death was indeed there. The ground under oneof the squatters’ villages had caved in after a lightning stroke, destroying several ofthe malodorous shanties; but upon this property damage was superimposed an organic devastationwhich paled it to insignificance. Of a possible 75 natives who had inhabited this spot, notone living specimen was visible. The disordered earth was covered with blood and human debrisbespeaking too vividly the ravages of daemon teeth and talons; yet no visible trail led awayfrom the carnage. That some hideous animal must be the cause, everyone quickly agreed; nor didany tongue now revive the charge that such cryptic deaths formed merely the sordid murders commonin decadent communities. That charge was revived only when about 25 of the estimated populationwere found missing from the dead; and even then it was hard to explain the murder of fifty byhalf that number. But the fact remained that on a summer night a bolt had come out of the heavensand left a dead village whose corpses were horribly mangled, chewed, and clawed.

The excited countryside immediately connected the horror with the haunted Martensemansion, though the localities were over three miles apart. The troopers were more sceptical;including the mansion only casually in their investigations, and dropping it altogether whenthey found it thoroughly deserted. Country and village people, however, canvassed the placewith infinite care; overturning everything in the house, sounding ponds and brooks, beatingdown bushes, and ransacking the nearby forests. All was in vain; the death that had come hadleft 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 interviewsto elucidate the horror’s history as told by local grandams. I followed the accounts languidlyat first, for I am a connoisseur in horrors; but after a week I detected an atmosphere whichstirred me oddly, so that on August 5th, 1921, I registered among the reporters who crowdedthe hotel at Lefferts Corners, nearest village to Tempest Mountain and acknowledged headquartersof the searchers. Three weeks more, and the dispersal of the reporters left me free to begina terrible exploration based on the minute inquiries and surveying with which I had meanwhilebusied myself.

So on this summer night, while distant thunder rumbled, I left a silent motor-carand 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 throughgiant oaks ahead. In this morbid night solitude and feeble shifting illumination, the vast box-likepile 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 calledthe death-daemon out of some fearsome secret place; and be that daemon solid entity or vaporouspestilence, I meant to see it.

I had thoroughly searched the ruin before, hence knew my plan well; choosingas the seat of my vigil the old room of Jan Martense, whose murder looms so great in the rurallegends. I felt subtly that the apartment of this ancient victim was best for my purposes. Thechamber, measuring about twenty feet square, contained like the other rooms some rubbish whichhad once been furniture. It lay on the second story, on the southeast corner of the house, andhad an immense east window and narrow south window, both devoid of panes or shutters. Oppositethe large window was an enormous Dutch fireplace with scriptural tiles representing the prodigalson, 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 hadbrought with me. I knew they reached a suitable spot on the grass outside, for I had testedthem. Then the three of us dragged from another room a wide four-poster bedstead, crowding itlaterally against the window. Having strown it with fir boughs, all now rested on it with drawnautomatics, two relaxing while the third watched. From whatever direction the daemon 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 itwould pursue us far even at worst.

I watched from midnight to one o’clock, when in spite of the sinisterhouse, the unprotected window, and the approaching thunder and lightning, I felt singularlydrowsy. I was between my two companions, George Bennett being toward the window and WilliamTobey toward the fireplace. Bennett was asleep, having apparently felt the same anomalous drowsinesswhich affected me, so I designated Tobey for the next watch although even he was nodding. Itis curious how intently I had been watching that fireplace.

The increasing thunder must have affected my dreams, for in the brief timeI slept there came to me apocalyptic visions. Once I partly awaked, probably because the sleepertoward the window had restlessly flung an arm across my chest. I was not sufficiently awaketo see whether Tobey was attending to his duties as sentinel, but felt a distinct anxiety onthat score. Never before had the presence of evil so poignantly oppressed me. Later I must havedropped asleep again, for it was out of a phantasmal chaos that my mind leaped when the nightgrew hideous with shrieks beyond anything in my former experience or imagination.

In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelesslyand 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 retreatedand reverberated. There was no light, but I knew from the empty space at my right that Tobeywas gone, God alone knew whither. Across my chest still lay the heavy arm of the sleeper atmy 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 daemon flash of a monstrous fireball the sleeper started up suddenly while the glarefrom beyond the window threw his shadow vividly upon the chimney above the fireplace from whichmy eyes had never strayed. That I am still alive and sane, is a marvel I cannot fathom. I cannotfathom it, for the shadow on that chimney was not that of George Bennett or of any other humancreature, but a blasphemous abnormality from hell’s nethermost craters; a nameless, shapelessabomination which no mind could fully grasp and no pen even partly describe. In another secondI was alone in the accursed mansion, shivering and gibbering. George Bennett and William Tobeyhad 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 exhaustedin 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 saveof wild-armed titan trees, daemoniac mutterings of thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart thelow mounds that dotted and streaked the region.

As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I knewthat I had at last pried out one of earth’s supreme horrors—one of those namelessblights of outer voids whose faint daemon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rimof space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity. The shadowI had seen, I hardly dared to analyse or identify. Something had lain between me and the windowthat night, but I shuddered whenever I could not cast off the instinct to classify it. If ithad only snarled, or bayed, or laughed titteringly—even that would have relieved the abysmalhideousness. But it was so silent. It had rested a heavy arm or fore leg on my chest. . . .Obviously it was organic, or had once been organic. . . . Jan Martense, whoseroom I had invaded, was buried in the graveyard near the mansion. . . . I mustfind Bennett and Tobey, if they lived . . . why had it picked them, and leftme 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 downcompletely. I had already decided not to abandon the quest for the lurking fear, for in my rashignorance it seemed to me that uncertainty was worse than enlightenment, however terrible thelatter might prove to be. Accordingly I resolved in my mind the best course to pursue; whomto select for my confidences, and how to track down the thing which had obliterated two menand cast a nightmare shadow.

My chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable reporters,of whom several still remained to collect final echoes of the tragedy. It was from these thatI determined to choose a colleague, and the more I reflected the more my preference inclinedtoward 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 sawfrom the beginning that he was both interested and sympathetic, and when I had finished he analysedand discussed the thing with the greatest shrewdness and judgment. His advice, moreover, waseminently practical; for he recommended a postponement of operations at the Martense mansionuntil we might become fortified with more detailed historical and geographical data. On hisinitiative we combed the countryside for information regarding the terrible Martense family,and discovered a man who possessed a marvellously illuminating ancestral diary. We also talkedat length with such of the mountain mongrels as had not fled from the terror and confusion toremoter slopes, and arranged to precede our culminating task—the exhaustive and definitiveexamination of the mansion in the light of its detailed history—with an equally exhaustiveand definitive examination of spots associated with the various tragedies of squatter legend.

The results of this examination were not at first very enlightening, thoughour tabulation of them seemed to reveal a fairly significant trend; namely, that the numberof reported horrors was by far the greatest in areas either comparatively near the avoided houseor connected with it by stretches of the morbidly overnourished forest. There were, it is true,exceptions; indeed, the horror which had caught the world’s ear had happened in a treelessspace remote alike from the mansion and from any connecting woods.

As to the nature and appearance of the lurking fear, nothing could be gainedfrom the scared and witless shanty-dwellers. In the same breath they called it a snake and agiant, a thunder-devil and a bat, a vulture and a walking tree. We did, however, deem ourselvesjustified in assuming that it was a living organism highly susceptible to electrical storms;and although certain of the stories suggested wings, we believed that its aversion for openspaces made land locomotion a more probable theory. The only thing really incompatible withthe latter view was the rapidity with which the creature must have travelled in order to performall the deeds attributed to it.

When we came to know the squatters better, we found them curiously likeablein many ways. Simple animals they were, gently descending the evolutionary scale because oftheir unfortunate ancestry and stultifying isolation. They feared outsiders, but slowly grewaccustomed to us; finally helping vastly when we beat down all the thickets and tore out allthe partitions of the mansion in our search for the lurking fear. When we asked them to helpus find Bennett and Tobey they were truly distressed; for they wanted to help us, yet knew thatthese victims had gone as wholly out of the world as their own missing people. That great numbersof them had actually been killed and removed, just as the wild animals had long been exterminated,we were of course thoroughly convinced; and we waited apprehensively for further tragedies tooccur.

By the middle of October we were puzzled by our lack of progress. Owing tothe clear nights no daemoniac aggressions had taken place, and the completeness of our vainsearches of house and country almost drove us to regard the lurking fear as a non-material agency.We feared that the cold weather would come on and halt our explorations, for all agreed thatthe daemon was generally quiet in winter. Thus there was a kind of haste and desperation inour last daylight canvass of the horror-visited hamlet; a hamlet now deserted because of thesquatters’ fears.

The ill-fated squatter hamlet had borne no name, but had long stood in a shelteredthough treeless cleft between two elevations called respectively Cone Mountain and Maple Hill.It was closer to Maple Hill than to Cone Mountain, some of the crude abodes indeed being dugoutson the side of the former eminence. Geographically it lay about two miles northwest of the baseof Tempest Mountain, and three miles from the oak-girt mansion. Of the distance between thehamlet and the mansion, fully two miles and a quarter on the hamlet’s side was entirelyopen country; the plain being of fairly level character save for some of the low snake-likemounds, and having as vegetation only grass and scattered weeds. Considering this topography,we had finally concluded that the daemon must have come by way of Cone Mountain, a wooded southernprolongation of which ran to within a short distance of the westernmost spur of Tempest Mountain.The upheaval of ground we traced conclusively to a landslide from Maple Hill, a tall lone splinteredtree on whose side had been the striking point of the thunderbolt which summoned the fiend.

As for the twentieth time or more Arthur Munroe and I went minutely over everyinch of the violated village, we were filled with a certain discouragement coupled with vagueand novel fears. It was acutely uncanny, even when frightful and uncanny things were common,to encounter so blankly clueless a scene after such overwhelming occurrences; and we moved aboutbeneath the leaden, darkening sky with that tragic directionless zeal which results from a combinedsense of futility and necessity of action. Our care was gravely minute; every cottage was againentered, every hillside dugout again searched for bodies, every thorny foot of adjacent slopeagain scanned for dens and caves, but all without result. And yet, as I have said, vague newfears hovered menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons squatted invisibly on themountain-tops and leered with Abaddon-eyes that had looked on trans-cosmic gulfs.

As the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and weheard the rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Tempest Mountain. This sound in such a localitynaturally stirred us, though less than it would have done at night. As it was, we hoped desperatelythat the storm would last until well after dark; and with that hope turned from our aimlesshillside searching toward the nearest inhabited hamlet to gather a body of squatters as helpersin the investigation. Timid as they were, a few of the younger men were sufficiently inspiredby our protective leadership to promise such help.

We had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended such a blindingsheet of torrential rain that shelter became imperative. The extreme, almost nocturnal darknessof the sky caused us to stumble sadly, but guided by the frequent flashes of lightning and byour minute knowledge of the hamlet we soon reached the least porous cabin of the lot; an heterogeneouscombination of logs and boards whose still existing door and single tiny window both faced MapleHill. Barring the door after us against the fury of the wind and rain, we put in place the crudewindow shutter which our frequent searches had taught us where to find. It was dismal sittingthere on rickety boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashedour pocket lamps about. Now and then we could see the lightning through the 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 thinghad happened; and again I wondered why the daemon, approaching the three watchers either fromthe window or the interior, had begun with the men on each side and left the middle man tillthe last, when the titan fireball had scared it away. Why had it not taken its victims in naturalorder, with myself second, from whichever direction it had approached? With what manner of far-reachingtentacles did it prey? Or did it know that I was the leader, and save me for a fate worse thanthat of my companions?

In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to intensifythem, there fell near by a terrific bolt of lightning followed by the sound of sliding earth.At the same time the wolfish wind rose to daemoniac crescendoes of ululation. We were sure thatthe lone tree on Maple Hill had been struck again, and Munroe rose from his box and went tothe tiny window to ascertain the damage. When he took down the shutter the wind and rain howleddeafeningly in, so that I could not hear what he said; but I waited while he leaned out andtried to fathom Nature’s pandemonium.

Gradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness toldof the storm’s passing. I had hoped it would last into the night to help our quest, buta furtive sunbeam from a knothole behind me removed the likelihood of such a thing. Suggestingto Munroe that we had better get some light even if more showers came, I unbarred and openedthe crude door. The ground outside was a singular mass of mud and pools, with fresh heaps ofearth from the slight landslide; but I saw nothing to justify the interest which kept my companionsilently leaning out the window. Crossing to where he leaned, I touched his shoulder; but hedid not move. Then, as I playfully shook him and turned him around, I felt the strangling tendrilsof a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of thenight that broods beyond time.

For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged headthere 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 theafternoon, because a thunderstorm was brewing, and now that it was dark and the storm had burstabove the maniacally thick foliage I was glad.

I believe that my mind was partly unhinged by events since August 5th; thedaemon shadow in the mansion, the general strain and disappointment, and the thing that occurredat the hamlet in an October storm. After that thing I had dug a grave for one whose death Icould not understand. I knew that others could not understand either, so let them think ArthurMunroe 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 mansionhad done something to my brain, and I could think only of the quest for a horror now grown tocataclysmic stature in my imagination; a quest which the fate of Arthur Munroe made me vow tokeep silent and solitary.

The scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinaryman. Baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillarsof some hellish Druidic temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admittingbut little rain. Beyond the scarred trunks in the background, illumined by faint flashes offiltered lightning, rose the damp ivied stones of the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearerwas the abandoned Dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid,overnourished 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 suckedvenom from what lay below. Now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festeredin the antediluvian forest darkness, I could trace the sinister outlines of some of those lowmounds which characterised the lightning-pierced region.

History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had aftereverything else ended in mocking Satanism. I now believed that the lurking fear was no materialthing, but a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning. And I believed, because ofthe masses of local tradition I had unearthed in my search with Arthur Munroe, that the ghostwas that of Jan Martense, who died in 1762. That is why I was digging idiotically in his grave.

The Martense mansion was built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy New-Amsterdammerchant who disliked the changing order under British rule, and had constructed this magnificentdomicile 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 prevalenceof violent thunderstorms in summer. When selecting the hill and building his mansion, MynheerMartense had laid these frequent natural outbursts to some peculiarity of the year; but in timehe perceived that the locality was especially liable to such phenomena. At length, having foundthese storms injurious to his health, he fitted up a cellar into which he could retreat fromtheir wildest pandemonium.

Of Gerrit Martense’s descendants less is known than of himself; sincethey were all reared in hatred of the English civilisation, and trained to shun such of thecolonists as accepted it. Their life was exceedingly secluded, and people declared that theirisolation had made them heavy of speech and comprehension. In appearance all were marked bya peculiar inherited dissimilarity of eyes; one generally being blue and the other brown. Theirsocial contacts grew fewer and fewer, till at last they took to intermarrying with the numerousmenial 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. Therest 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 Conventionreached Tempest Mountain. He was the first of Gerrit’s descendants to see much of theworld; and when he returned in 1760 after six years of campaigning, he was hated as an outsiderby his father, uncles, and brothers, in spite of his dissimilar Martense eyes. No longer couldhe share the peculiarities and prejudices of the Martenses, while the very mountain thunderstormsfailed to intoxicate him as they had before. Instead, his surroundings depressed him; and hefrequently 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 andquarrels at the Martense mansion. Determined to visit Jan in person, he went into the mountainson horseback. His diary states that he reached Tempest Mountain on September 20, finding themansion in great decrepitude. The sullen, odd-eyed Martenses, whose unclean animal aspect shockedhim, told him in broken gutturals that Jan was dead. He had, they insisted, been struck by lightningthe autumn before; and now lay buried behind the neglected sunken gardens. They shewed the visitorthe grave, barren and devoid of markers. Something in the Martenses’ manner gave Gifforda feeling of repulsion and suspicion, and a week later he returned with spade and mattock toexplore the sepulchral spot. He found what he expected—a skull crushed cruelly as if bysavage blows—so returning to Albany he openly charged the Martenses with the murder oftheir 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 independentlyby the products of their estate, for occasional lights glimpsed from far-away hills attestedtheir continued presence. These lights were seen as late as 1810, but toward the last they becamevery infrequent.

Meanwhile there grew up about the mansion and the mountain a body of diaboliclegendry. The place was avoided with doubled assiduousness, and invested with every whisperedmyth tradition could supply. It remained unvisited till 1816, when the continued absence oflights was noticed by the squatters. At that time a party made investigations, finding the housedeserted 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 shewed how numerousit had grown prior to its migration. Its cultural level had fallen very low, as proved by decayingfurniture 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 grewvery 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 onthe night I dug in Jan Martense’s grave.

I have described my protracted digging as idiotic, and such it indeed was inobject and method. The coffin of Jan Martense had soon been unearthed—it now held onlydust and nitre—but in my fury to exhume his ghost I delved irrationally and clumsily downbeneath where he had lain. God knows what I expected to find—I only felt that I was diggingin 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 circ*mstances, wastremendous; for in the existence of a subterranean space here, my mad theories had terribleconfirmation. My slight fall had extinguished the lantern, but I produced an electric pocketlamp 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 havetried it at that time, I forgot danger, reason, and cleanliness in my single-minded fever tounearth the lurking fear. Choosing the direction toward the house, I scrambled recklessly intothe narrow burrow; squirming ahead blindly and rapidly, and flashing but seldom the lamp I keptbefore me.

What language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely abysmalearth; pawing, twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through sunken convolutions of immemorialblackness without an idea of time, safety, direction, or definite object? There is somethinghideous 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 accidentthat after interminable writhings I jarred my forgotten electric lamp alight, so that it shoneeerily 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 burnedvery low, when the passage suddenly inclined sharply upward, altering my mode of progress. Andas I raised my glance it was without preparation that I saw glistening in the distance two daemoniacreflections of my expiring lamp; two reflections glowing with a baneful and unmistakable effulgence,and provoking maddeningly nebulous memories. I stopped automatically, though lacking the brainto retreat. The eyes approached, yet of the thing that bore them I could distinguish only aclaw. But what a claw! Then far overhead I heard a faint crashing which I recognised. It wasthe wild thunder of the mountain, raised to hysteric fury—I must have been crawling upwardfor 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 wassaved by the very thunder that had summoned it, for after a hideous wait there burst from theunseen outside sky one of those frequent mountainward bolts whose aftermath I had noticed hereand there as gashes of disturbed earth and fulgurites of various sizes. With Cyclopean rageit tore through the soil above that damnable pit, blinding and deafening me, yet not whollyreducing me to a coma.

In the chaos of sliding, shifting earth I clawed and floundered helplesslytill the rain on my head steadied me and I saw that I had come to the surface in a familiarspot; a steep unforested place on the southwest slope of the mountain. Recurrent sheet lightningsillumed the tumbled ground and the remains of the curious low hummock which had stretched downfrom the wooded higher slope, but there was nothing in the chaos to shew my place of egressfrom the lethal catacomb. My brain was as great a chaos as the earth, and as a distant red glareburst 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 feltmore horror than that which the mould-burrow and the claw and eyes had given; more horror becauseof the overwhelming implications. In a hamlet twenty miles away an orgy of fear had followedthe bolt which brought me above ground, and a nameless thing had dropped from an overhangingtree into a weak-roofed cabin. It had done a deed, but the squatters had fired the cabin infrenzy before it could escape. It had been doing that deed at the very moment the earth cavedin 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 TempestMountain, would seek alone for the fear that lurked there. That at least two of the fear’sembodiments were destroyed, formed but a slight guarantee of mental and physical safety in thisAcheron of multiform diabolism; yet I continued my quest with even greater zeal as events andrevelations became more monstrous.

When, two days after my frightful crawl through that crypt of the eyes andclaw, I learned that a thing had malignly hovered twenty miles away at the same instant theeyes were glaring at me, I experienced virtual convulsions of fright. But that fright was somixed 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 citiestoward the grinning chasm of Nis, it is a relief and even a delight to shriek wildly and throwoneself voluntarily along with the hideous vortex of dream-doom into whatever bottomless gulfmay yawn. And so it was with the waking nightmare of Tempest Mountain; the discovery that twomonsters had haunted the spot gave me ultimately a mad craving to plunge into the very earthof the accursed region, and with bare hands dig out the death that leered from every inch ofthe poisonous soil.

As soon as possible I visited the grave of Jan Martense and dug vainly whereI 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 deeplyI had dug that other day. I likewise made a difficult trip to the distant hamlet where the death-creaturehad been burnt, and was little repaid for my trouble. In the ashes of the fateful cabin I foundseveral bones, but apparently none of the monster’s. The squatters said the thing hadhad only one victim; but in this I judged them inaccurate, since besides the complete skullof a human being, there was another bony fragment which seemed certainly to have belonged toa human skull at some time. Though the rapid drop of the monster had been seen, no one couldsay just what the creature was like; those who had glimpsed it called it simply a devil. Examiningthe great tree where it had lurked, I could discern no distinctive marks. I tried to find sometrail into the black forest, but on this occasion could not stand the sight of those morbidlylarge boles, or of those vast serpent-like roots that twisted so malevolently before they sankinto the earth.

My next step was to re-examine with microscopic care the deserted hamlet wheredeath had come most abundantly, and where Arthur Munroe had seen something he never lived todescribe. Though my vain previous searches had been exceedingly minute, I now had new data totest; for my horrible grave-crawl convinced me that at least one of the phases of the monstrosityhad been an underground creature. This time, on the fourteenth of November, my quest concerneditself mostly with the slopes of Cone Mountain and Maple Hill where they overlook the unfortunatehamlet, and I gave particular attention to the loose earth of the landslide region on the lattereminence.

The afternoon of my search brought nothing to light, and dusk came as I stoodon Maple Hill looking down at the hamlet and across the valley to Tempest Mountain. There hadbeen a gorgeous sunset, and now the moon came up, nearly full and shedding a silver flood overthe plain, the distant mountainside, and the curious low mounds that rose here and there. Itwas 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 seemedto me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with distortedhidden powers.

Presently, as I gazed abstractedly at the moonlit panorama, my eye became attractedby something singular in the nature and arrangement of a certain topographical element. Withouthaving any exact knowledge of geology, I had from the first been interested in the odd moundsand hummocks of the region. I had noticed that they were pretty widely distributed around TempestMountain, though less numerous on the plain than near the hill-top itself, where prehistoricglaciation 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 thevarious points and lines of the mound system had a peculiar relation to the summit of TempestMountain. That summit was undeniably a centre from which the lines or rows of points radiatedindefinitely and irregularly, as if the unwholesome Martense mansion had thrown visible tentaclesof terror. The idea of such tentacles gave me an unexplained thrill, and I stopped to analysemy reason for believing these mounds glacial phenomena.

The more I analysed the less I believed, and against my newly opened mind therebegan to beat grotesque and horrible analogies based on superficial aspects and upon my experiencebeneath 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 andTobey 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 emotionas I came upon a tunnel or burrow just like the one through which I had crawled on that otherdaemoniac 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 unreasoninglyin all parts of the brier-choked cellar; digging to find the core and centre of that malignantuniverse of mounds. And then I recall how I laughed when I stumbled on the passageway; the holeat the base of the old chimney, where the thick weeds grew and cast queer shadows in the lightof 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; perhapsthat had finished it. But still there remained that burning determination to reach the innermostsecret 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 immediatelywith my pocket-light or to try to assemble a band of squatters for the quest, was interruptedafter a time by a sudden rush of wind from outside which blew out the candle and left me instark blackness. The moon no longer shone through the chinks and apertures above me, and witha 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 farthestcorner of the cellar. My eyes, however, never turned away from the horrible opening at the baseof the chimney; and I began to get glimpses of the crumbling bricks and unhealthy weeds as faintglows of lightning penetrated the woods 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 callforth—or was there anything left for it to call? Guided by a lightning flash I settledmyself down behind a dense clump of vegetation, through which I could see the opening withoutbeing seen.

If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sightthat I saw, and let me live my last years in peace. I cannot sleep at night now, and have totake opiates when it thunders. The thing came abruptly and unannounced; a daemon, rat-like scurryingfrom pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from thatopening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life—a loathsome night-spawnedflood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortalmadness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents’ slime it rolledup and out of that yawning hole, spreading like a septic contagion and streaming from the cellarat every point of egress—streaming out to scatter through the accursed midnight forestsand strew fear, madness, and death.

God knows how many there were—there must have been thousands. To seethe stream of them in that faint, intermittent lightning was shocking. When they had thinnedout enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms, I saw that they were dwarfed, deformed hairydevils or apes—monstrous and diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe. They were so hideouslysilent; there was hardly a squeal when one of the last stragglers turned with the skill of longpractice to make a meal in accustomed fashion on a weaker companion. Others snapped up whatit left and ate with slavering relish. Then, in spite of my daze of fright and disgust, my morbidcuriosity triumphed; and as the last of the monstrosities oozed up alone from that nether worldof unknown nightmare, I drew my automatic pistol and shot it under cover of the thunder.

Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing oneanother through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky . . .formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrousovernourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminouswith millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypousperversion . . . insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcadeschoked with fungous vegetation. . . . Heaven be thanked for the instinct whichled me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calmstars of clearing skies.

I had recovered enough in a week to send to Albany for a gang of men to blowup the Martense mansion and the entire top of Tempest Mountain with dynamite, stop up all thediscoverable mound-burrows, and destroy certain overnourished trees whose very existence seemedan insult to sanity. I could sleep a little after they had done this, but true rest will nevercome 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 allover the world? Who can, with my knowledge, think of the earth’s unknown caverns withouta nightmare dread of future possibilities? I cannot see a well or a subway entrance withoutshuddering . . . why cannot the doctors give me something to make me sleep, ortruly calm my brain when it thunders?

What I saw in the glow of my flashlight after I shot the unspeakable stragglingobject was so simple that almost a minute elapsed before I understood and went delirious. Theobject 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 thesnarling chaos and grinning fear that lurk behind life. It had looked at me as it died, andits eyes had the same odd quality that marked those other eyes which had stared at me undergroundand excited cloudy recollections. One eye was blue, the other brown. They were the dissimilarMartense eyes of the old legends, and I knew in one inundating cataclysm of voiceless horrorwhat had become of that vanished family; the terrible and thunder-crazed house of Martense.

I.

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly intothe composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous positionamong persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancientcity of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during hisunsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the MansionHouse 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 toMrs. Whitman’s home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St. John’s, whosehidden 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’sgreatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on theeastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side-hill,with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It doesnot appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticedit. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranksin horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and standsstarkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

The house was—and for that matter still is—of a kind to attractthe attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the averageNew England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century—the prosperous peaked-roofsort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior panellingdictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable end buried tothe lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations towardthe street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and straighteningof the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street—at first called Back Street—waslaid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened onlywhen the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut throughthe old family plots.

At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawnfrom the roadway; but a widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared offmost of the intervening space, exposing the foundations so that a brick basem*nt wall had tobe made, giving the deep cellar a street frontage with door and two windows above ground, closeto the new line of public travel. When the sidewalk was laid out a century ago the last of theintervening space was removed; and Poe in his walks must have seen only a sheer ascent of dullgrey brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height of ten feet by the antique shingledbulk of the house proper.

The farm-like grounds extended back very deeply up the hill, almost to WheatonStreet. The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of course greatly abovethe existing sidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp, mossy stonepierced by a steep flight of narrow steps which led inward between canyon-like surfaces to theupper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walls, and neglected gardens whose dismantled cementurns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods of knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia set offthe weather-beaten front door with its broken fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters, and wormy triangularpediment.

What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people diedthere in alarmingly great numbers. That, I was told, was why the original owners had moved outsome twenty years after building the place. It was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because of thedampness 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 allthat gained belief among the persons 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 undercurrentof folklore among old-time servants and humble folk; surmises which never travelled far, andwhich were largely forgotten when Providence grew to be a metropolis with a shifting modernpopulation.

The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part ofthe community as in any real sense “haunted”. There were no widespread tales ofrattling chains, cold currents of air, extinguished lights, or faces at the window. Extremistssometimes said the house was “unlucky”, but that is as far as even they went. Whatwas 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 buildinghad become deserted through the sheer impossibility of renting it. These persons were not allcut 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, andsometimes 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 shew me thenotes which finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation. In my childhood the shunnedhouse was vacant, with barren, gnarled, and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass, andnightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boysused to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbidstrangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the dilapidatedhouse, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders. The small-paned windowswere largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious panelling, shakyinterior shutters, peeling wall-paper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragmentsof 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 rafteredlength lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckageof chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festoonedinto monstrous and hellish shapes.

But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It wasthe dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though it waswholly above ground on the street side, with only a thin door and window-pierced brick wallto 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 thehouse was strongest there; and for another thing, we did not like the white fungous growthswhich 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 othersituation. They rotted quickly, and at one stage became slightly phosphorescent; so that nocturnalpassers-by sometimes spoke of witch-fires glowing behind the broken panes of the foetor-spreadingwindows.

We never—even in our wildest Hallowe’en moods—visited thiscellar by night, but in some of our daytime visits could detect the phosphorescence, especiallywhen the day was dark and wet. There was also a subtler thing we often thought we detected—avery strange thing which was, however, merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of cloudywhitish pattern on the dirt floor—a vague, shifting deposit of mould or nitre which wesometimes thought we could trace amidst the sparse fungous growths near the huge fireplace ofthe basem*nt kitchen. Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny resemblanceto a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship existed, and often there wasno whitish deposit whatever. On a certain rainy afternoon when this illusion seemed phenomenallystrong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmeringexhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncleabout the matter. He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged withreminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient talesof the common folk—a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smokefrom the great chimney, and queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots thatthrust 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 collectedconcerning 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, hadnothing to do with abnormality; but he realised that the very picturesqueness which arousedhis own interest would in a boy’s fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginativeassociations.

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 guardiansof tradition as Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one manservant in a Georgianhomestead with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on a steep ascent of North CourtStreet beside the ancient brick court and colony house where his grandfather—a cousinof that celebrated privateersman, Capt. Whipple, who burnt His Majesty’s armed schoonerGaspee in 1772—had voted in the legislature on May 4, 1776, for the independenceof the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the damp, low-ceiled library with the musty whitepanelling, heavy carved overmantel, and small-paned, vine-shaded windows, were the relics andrecords of his ancient family, among which were many dubious allusions to the shunned housein Benefit Street. That pest spot lies not far distant—for Benefit runs ledgewise justabove 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 myuncle 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 continuousthread of brooding, tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which impressed me even morethan it had impressed the good doctor. Separate events fitted together uncannily, and seeminglyirrelevant details held mines of hideous possibilities. A new and burning curiosity grew inme, compared to which my boyish curiosity was feeble and inchoate. The first revelation ledto an exhaustive research, and finally to that shuddering quest which proved so disastrous tomyself and mine. For at last my uncle insisted on joining the search I had commenced, and aftera certain night in that house he did not come away with me. I am lonely without that gentlesoul 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 thatPoe loved—the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and headstones huddlequietly 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 traceof the sinister either about its construction or about the prosperous and honourable familywho 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 structurein 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. Harriswas a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India trade, connected with the firm of ObadiahBrown 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 enablinghim 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 fashionableBack Street, which ran along the side of the hill above crowded Cheapside—was all thatcould be wished, and the building did justice to the location. It was the best that moderatemeans could afford, and Harris hastened to move in before the birth of a fifth child which thefamily expected. That child, a boy, came in December; but was still-born. Nor was any childto be born alive in that house for a century and a half.

The next April sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail and Ruth diedbefore the month was over. Dr. Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as some infantile fever, thoughothers declared it was more of a mere wasting-away or decline. It seemed, in any event, to becontagious; for Hannah Bowen, one of the two servants, died of it in the following June. EliLiddeason, the other servant, constantly complained of weakness; and would have returned tohis father’s farm in Rehoboth but for a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who washired to succeed Hannah. He died the next year—a sad year indeed, since it marked thedeath of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate of Martinique, where hisoccupation had kept him for considerable periods during the preceding decade.

The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband’sdeath, and the passing of her first-born 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 upperpart of the house; her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge ofthe family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength; but her health visibly declinedfrom the time of her advent. She was greatly devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especialaffection 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 complaintthat he disliked the smell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure no more help, since theseven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within five years’ space, had begun toset 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 NorthKingstown 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. Mercyshould have known better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country, for that remotebit of backwoods was then, as now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As latelyas 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order toprevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and peace, and one may imaginethe point of view of the same section in 1768. Ann’s tongue was perniciously active, andwithin a few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and amiable Amazonfrom Newport, Maria Robbins.

Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and imaginingsof the most hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable, and for long periods shewould utter shrieking horrors which necessitated her son’s temporary residence with hiscousin, Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian-Lane near the new college building. The boy would seemto improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise as she was well-meaning, she wouldhave 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 nullifythemselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly it sounds absurd to hear that a woman educatedonly in the rudiments of French often shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of thatlanguage, or that the same person, alone and guarded, complained wildly of a staring thing whichbit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it shelaughed with a shocking delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, andwas laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.

Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris, despitehis scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, managed to enlist in the Army of Observationunder General Greene; and from that time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In1780, as a Captain in Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell, he met and marriedPhebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to Providence upon his honourable dischargein 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 changedin name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter’s once robust frame had undergonea sad and curious decay, so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voiceand disconcerting pallor—qualities shared to a singular degree by the one remaining servantMaria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenthof the next May Mercy Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.

William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically unhealthful natureof his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and closing it forever. Securing temporary quartersfor himself and his wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building ofa new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the growing part of the town across the GreatBridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was born; and there the family dwelt till the encroachmentsof commerce drove them back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in the newerEast Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofedmansion in 1876. William and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic of 1797, butDutee was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg’s son.

Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house despite William’swish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation to his ward to make the most of all theboy’s property, nor did he concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which causedso many changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the house was generallyregarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation when, in 1804, the town council ordered himto fumigate the place with sulphur, tar, and gum camphor on account of the much-discussed deathsof four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fever epidemic. They said the placehad 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. Hereturned unharmed, married in 1814, and became a father on that memorable night of September23, 1815, when a great gale drove the waters of the bay over half the town, and floated a tallsloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts almost tapped the Harris windows in symbolicaffirmation that the new boy, Welcome, was a seaman’s son.

Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburgin 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the shunned house as other than a nuisance almostimpossible to rent—perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odour of unkempt oldage. Indeed, it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating in 1861, which the excitementof the war tended to throw into obscurity. Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew itonly as a deserted and somewhat picturesque centre 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 accountdecided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty inobtaining tenants. The horror has gone.

III.

It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of the Harrises. In thiscontinuous record there seemed to me to brood a persistent evil beyond anything in Nature asI had known it; an evil clearly connected with the house and not with the family. This impressionwas confirmed by my uncle’s less systematic array of miscellaneous data—legendstranscribed 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 antiquarianand very deeply interested in the shunned house; but I may refer to several dominant pointswhich 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—AnnWhite especially—who would not use the cellar kitchen, and at least three well-definedlegends bore upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots and patchesof mould in that region. These latter narratives interested me profoundly, on account of whatI had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that most of the significance had in each case been largelyobscured by additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.

Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagantand at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that there must lie buried beneath the houseone of those vampires—the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breathof 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 leastdrive a stake through that organ; and Ann’s dogged insistence on a search under the cellarhad been prominent in bringing about her discharge.

Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily acceptedbecause the house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes. To me their interest dependedless on this circ*mstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed withcertain other things—the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith, who had precededAnn and never heard of her, that something “sucked his breath” at night; the death-certificatesof fever victims of 1804, issued by Dr. Chad Hopkins, and shewing the four deceased personsall 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 mean odd sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely separated newspaper cuttings relatingto deaths in the shunned house—one from the Providence Gazette and Country-Journalof April 12, 1815, and the other from the Daily Transcript and Chronicle of October 27,1845—each of which detailed an appallingly grisly circ*mstance whose duplication was remarkable.It seems that in both instances the dying person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford andin 1845 a school-teacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured in a horribleway; glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of the attending physician. Even morepuzzling, though, was the final case which put an end to the renting of the house—a seriesof anaemia deaths preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily attemptthe lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrist.

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 theill-smelling and widely shunned house could now be rented to no others—would babble maledictionsin French, a language they could not possibly have studied to any extent. It made one thinkof poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collectinghistorical 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 hadthought deeply on the subject, and that he was glad of my own interest—an open-mindedand sympathetic interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters at which others wouldmerely have laughed. His fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he felt that the place was rarein its imaginative potentialities, and worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of thegrotesque 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 more as I could.I talked with the elderly Archer Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his deathin 1916; and obtained from him and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an authentic corroborationof all the family data my uncle had collected. When, however, I asked them what connexion withFrance or its language the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly baffled andignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss Harris could say was that an old allusionher 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 knownthe legend; but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins, seemed darkly awareof 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 theshunned 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 circ*mstance in Mercy’s lastmoments, but he had soon forgotten 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 interestedin the house as was Archer’s son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked aftermy 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 thatwhich my uncle had occasionally shewn in the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive historyof the site from its very settlement in 1636—or even before, if any Narragansett Indianlegend could be unearthed to supply the data. I found, at the start, that the land had beenpart of the long strip of home lot granted originally to John Throckmorton; one of many similarstrips beginning at the Town Street beside the river and extending up over the hill to a lineroughly 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 Backor 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 transferredat 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 themain body of records and might easily have been missed—upon something which aroused mykeenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with several of the queerest phases of the affair. Itwas 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 whichthe name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weird and heterogeneous reading—andI feverishly studied the platting of the locality as it had been before the cutting throughand 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-storyand 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 Societyand Shepley Library before I could find a local door which the name Etienne Roulet would unlock.In the end I did find something; something of such vague but monstrous import that I set aboutat 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 westshore of Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had encountered much oppositionbefore the Providence selectmen allowed them to settle in the town. Unpopularity had doggedthem in East Greenwich, whither they had come in 1686, after the revocation of the Edict ofNantes, 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 whichnot even Governor Andros could quell. But their ardent Protestantism—too ardent, somewhispered—and their evident distress when virtually driven from the village down the bay,had moved the sympathy of the town fathers. Here the strangers had been granted a haven; andthe swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawingqueer 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—perhapsforty years later, after old Roulet’s death—and no one seemed to hear of the familyafter that.

For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well remembered andfrequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a New England seaport. Etienne’sson Paul, a surly fellow whose erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped outthe family, was particularly a source of speculation; and though Providence never shared thewitchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbours, it was freely intimated by old wives that his prayerswere neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this hadundoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins. What relation it hadto the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and other inhabitants of the shunned house, imaginationor future discovery alone could determine. I wondered how many of those who had known the legendsrealised that additional link with the terrible which my wide reading had given me; that ominousitem 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 theParis parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had been found covered with blood and shreds offlesh in a wood, shortly after the killing and rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolfwas seen to lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance asto name and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips could not have generally knownof it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would have brought some drastic and frightenedaction—indeed, might not its limited whispering have precipitated the final riot whicherased the Roulets from the town?

I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the unwholesomevegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the building, and poring over every inchof the earthen cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington Harris’s permission, I fitted akey to the disused door opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring tohave a more immediate access to the outside world than the dark stairs, ground floor hall, andfront door could give. There, where morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked duringlong afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground windows, anda sense of security glowed from the unlocked door which placed me only a few feet from the placidsidewalk outside. Nothing new rewarded my efforts—only the same depressing mustiness andfaint suggestions of noxious odours and nitrous outlines on the floor—and I fancy thatmany pedestrians must have watched me curiously through the broken panes.

At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle’s, I decided to try the spotnocturnally; and one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the mouldy floorwith its uncanny shapes and distorted, half-phosphorescent fungi. The place had dispirited mecuriously that evening, and I was almost prepared when I saw—or thought I saw—amidstthe whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition of the “huddled form” I hadsuspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and unprecedented—and as I watchedI seemed to see again the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation which had startled me on thatrainy 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 developvague and shocking suggestions of form, gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passingup 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—andas I watched I felt that it was in turn watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable thanvisible. 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 possibledestroy—the horror of the house by a joint night or nights of aggressive vigil in thatmusty and fungus-cursed cellar.

IV.

On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of Carrington Harris which did notinclude surmises as to what we expected to find, my uncle and I conveyed to the shunned housetwo camp chairs and a folding camp cot, together with some scientific mechanism of greater weightand intricacy. These we placed in the cellar during the day, screening the windows with paperand planning to return in the evening for our first vigil. We had locked the door from the cellarto the ground floor; and having a key to the outside cellar door, we were prepared to leaveour expensive and delicate apparatus—which we had obtained secretly and at great cost—asmany days as our vigils might need to be protracted. It was our design to sit up together tillvery 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 thelaboratories of Brown University and the Cranston Street Armoury, and instinctively assumeddirection of our venture, was a marvellous commentary on the potential vitality and resilienceof a man of eighty-one. Elihu Whipple had lived according to the hygienic laws he had preachedas a physician, and but for what happened later would be here in full vigour today. Only twopersons suspect what did happen—Carrington Harris and myself. I had to tell Harris becausehe owned the house and deserved to know what had gone out of it. Then too, we had spoken tohim in advance of our quest; and I felt after my uncle’s going that he would understandand assist me in some vitally necessary public explanations. He turned very pale, but agreedto 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 bean exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. We were not, as I have said, in any sense childishlysuperstitious, but scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe ofthree dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. Inthis case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointedto the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point ofview is concerned, exceptional malignancy. To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolveswould be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not preparedto deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital forceand attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of itsmore intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our ownto furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may neverhope to understand.

In short, it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array of factspointed to some lingering influence in the shunned house; traceable to one or another of theill-favoured French settlers of two centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknownlaws of atomic and electronic motion. That the family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinityfor outer circles of entity—dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion andterror—their recorded history seemed to prove. Had not, then, the riots of those bygoneseventeen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid brain of one or more ofthem—notably the sinister Paul Roulet—which obscurely survived the bodies murderedand buried by the mob, and continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned space along theoriginal lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the encroaching community?

Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in thelight 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, keptalive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissues andfluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabricit sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or it might be dictatedmerely by blind motives of self-preservation. In any case such a monster must of necessity bein our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty withevery 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 encounterthe thing. No sane person had even seen it, and few had ever felt it definitely. It might bepure energy—a form ethereal and outside the realm of substance—or it might be partlymaterial; some unknown and equivocal mass of plasticity, capable of changing at will to nebulousapproximations of the solid, liquid, gaseous, or tenuously unparticled states. The anthropomorphicpatch of mould on the floor, the form of the yellowish vapour, and the curvature of the tree-rootsin some of the old tales, all argued at least a remote and reminiscent connexion with the humanshape; but how representative or permanent that similarity might be, none could say with anykind of certainty.

We had devised two weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookestube 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 partlymaterial 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 aggressivemechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with reference to the cot andchairs, and to the spot before the fireplace where the mould had taken strange shapes. Thatsuggestive 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 hadever 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 continuedwe found no promise of pertinent developments. A weak, filtered glow from the rain-harassedstreet-lamps outside, and a feeble phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within, shewedthe 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 whathad been stools, chairs, and tables, and other more shapeless furniture; the heavy planks andmassive beams of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit plank door leading to bins and chambersbeneath 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 revealedthe past presence of hooks, andirons, spit, crane, and a door to the Dutch oven—thesethings, and our austere cot and camp chairs, and the heavy and intricate destructive machinerywe 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 beyondour power to deal with. It was our idea that our continued nocturnal presence would call forthwhatever malign entity lurked there; and that being prepared, we could dispose of the thingwith 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 tous, too, that our venture was far from safe; for in what strength the thing might appear noone 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 defeatour entire purpose. Such was our frame of mind as we talked—far into the night, till myuncle’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—Isay 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 thehouse was repulsively damp even in dry weather, and in this storm positively swamp-like. I studiedthe loose, antique masonry of the walls in the fungus-light and the feeble rays which stolein from the street through the screened windows; and once, when the noisome atmosphere of theplace seemed about to sicken me, I opened the door and looked up and down the street, feastingmy eyes on familiar sights and my nostrils on the wholesome air. Still nothing occurred to rewardmy 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 turnedrestlessly on the cot several times during the latter half of the first hour, but now he wasbreathing with unusual irregularity, occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than a fewof the qualities of a choking moan. I turned my electric flashlight on him and found his faceaverted, so rising and crossing to the other side of the cot, I again flashed the light to seeif he seemed in any pain. What I saw unnerved me most surprisingly, considering its relativetriviality. It must have been merely the association of any odd circ*mstance with the sinisternature of our location and mission, for surely the circ*mstance was not in itself frightfulor unnatural. It was merely that my uncle’s facial expression, disturbed no doubt by thestrange dreams which our situation prompted, betrayed considerable agitation, and seemed notat 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, thatit was this variety which chiefly disturbed me. My uncle, as he gasped and tossed inincreasing perturbation and with eyes that had now started open, seemed not one 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 mouthand teeth as he spoke. The words were at first indistinguishable, and then—with a tremendousstart—I recognised something about them which filled me with icy fear till I recalledthe breadth of my uncle’s education and the interminable translations he had made fromanthropological and antiquarian articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes. For the venerableElihu Whipple was muttering in French, and the few phrases I could distinguish seemedconnected 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 leapedabruptly up, half awake. The jumble of French changed to a cry in English, and the hoarse voiceshouted excitedly, “My breath, my breath!” Then the awakening became complete, andwith a subsidence of facial expression to the normal state my uncle seized my hand and beganto 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-picturesinto 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 familiarthings in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of queerly disorderedpictures superimposed one upon another; an arrangement in which the essentials of time as wellas of space seemed dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopicvortex of phantasmal images were occasional snapshots, if one might use the term, of singularclearness but unaccountable heterogeneity.

Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd ofangry faces framed by straggling locks and three-cornered hats frowning down on him. Again heseemed to be in the interior of a house—an old house, apparently—but the detailsand inhabitants were constantly changing, and he could never be certain of the faces or thefurniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and windows seemed in just as great a stateof flux as the more presumably mobile objects. It was queer—damnably queer—and myuncle spoke almost sheepishly, as if half expecting not to be believed, when he declared thatof the strange faces many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family. And allthe while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if some pervasive presence had spreaditself through his body and sought to possess itself of his vital processes. I shuddered atthe 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 visionscould be, at most, no more than my uncle’s reaction to the investigations and expectationswhich had lately filled our minds to the exclusion of all else.

Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness; and in timeI yielded to my yawns and took my turn at slumber. My uncle seemed now very wakeful, and welcomedhis period of watching even though the nightmare had aroused him far ahead of his allotted twohours. Sleep seized me quickly, and I was at once haunted with dreams of the most disturbingkind. I felt, in my visions, a cosmic and abysmal loneness; with hostility surging from allsides upon some prison where I lay confined. I seemed bound and gagged, and taunted by the echoingyells of distant multitudes who thirsted for my blood. My uncle’s face came to me withless pleasant associations than in waking hours, and I recall many futile struggles and attemptsto scream. It was not a pleasant sleep, and for a second I was not sorry for the echoing shriekwhich clove through the barriers of dream and flung me to a sharp and startled awakeness inwhich every actual object before my eyes stood out with more than natural clearness and reality.

V.

I had been lying with my face away from my uncle’s chair, so that in this sudden flashof awakening I saw only the door to the street, the more northerly window, and the wall andfloor and ceiling toward the north of the room, all photographed with morbid vividness on mybrain in a light brighter than the glow of the fungi or the rays from the street outside. Itwas not a strong or even a fairly strong light; certainly not nearly strong enough to read anaverage 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 unhealthysharpness despite the fact that two of my other senses were violently assailed. For on my earsrang the reverberations of that shocking scream, while my nostrils revolted at the stench whichfilled the place. My mind, as alert as my senses, recognised the gravely unusual; and almostautomatically I leaped up and turned about to grasp the destructive instruments which we hadleft 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 shouldhave to defend him and myself.

Yet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors beyondhorrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos savesto blast an accursed and unhappy few. Out of the fungus-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light,yellow and diseased, which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines half-humanand half-monstrous, through which I could see the chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes—wolfishand mocking—and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mistwhich 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 approachto 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 attentionwas focussed. That object was my uncle—the venerable Elihu Whipple—who with blackeningand decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and reached out dripping claws to rend me inthe fury which this horror had brought.

It was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled myselfin preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training saved me. Recognising the bubblingevil as no substance reachable by matter or material chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-throwerwhich loomed on my left, I threw on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus, and focussedtoward that scene of immortal blasphemousness the strongest ether radiations which man’sart can arouse from the spaces and fluids of Nature. There was a bluish haze and a frenziedsputtering, and the yellowish phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes. But I saw the dimnesswas 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 whichbrought cries to my lips and sent me fumbling and staggering toward that unlocked door to thequiet street, careless of what abnormal terrors I loosed upon the world, or what thoughts orjudgments of men I brought down upon my head. In that dim blend of blue and yellow the formof my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction whose essence eludes all description, andin which there played across his vanishing face such changes of identity as only madness canconceive. He was at once a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant. Lit by themixed 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 likenessof 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 secondthere flashed a degraded counterfeit of a miniature of poor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seenin the School of Design Museum, and another time I thought I caught the raw-boned image of MercyDexter as I recalled her from a painting in Carrington Harris’s house. It was frightfulbeyond conception; toward the last, when a curious blend of servant and baby visages flickeredclose to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish grease was spreading, it seemed as thoughthe shifting features fought against themselves, and strove to form contours like those of myuncle’s kindly face. I like to think that he existed at that moment, and that he triedto bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccoughed a farewell from my own parched throat as I lurchedout into the street; a thin stream of grease following me through the door to the rain-drenchedsidewalk.

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 Hilland the Athenaeum, down Hopkins Street, and over the bridge to the business section where tallbuildings seemed to guard me as modern material things guard the world from ancient and unwholesomewonder. Then grey dawn unfolded wetly from the east, silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerablesteeples, and beckoning me to the place where my terrible work was still unfinished. And inthe end I went, wet, hatless, and dazed in the morning light, and entered that awful door inBenefit Street which I had left ajar, and which still swung cryptically in full sight of theearly householders to whom I dared not speak.

The grease was gone, for the mouldy floor was porous. And in front of the fireplacewas 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 couldscarcely recall what was dream and what was reality. Then thought trickled back, and I knewthat I had witnessed things more horrible than I had dreamed. Sitting down, I tried to conjectureas nearly as sanity would let me just what had happened, and how I might end the horror, ifindeed it had been real. Matter it seemed not to be, nor ether, nor anything else conceivableby mortal mind. What, then, but some exotic emanation; some vampirish vapour such asExeter rustics tell of as lurking over certain churchyards? This I felt was the clue, and againI 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 pickaxe, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboysof sulphuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned housein Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading andin 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 wasglad of that. I was still alone, for as much as I feared the unknown horror I sought, therewas 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 towardbelief. As I turned up the stinking black earth in front of the fireplace, my spade causinga viscous yellow ichor to ooze from the white fungi which it severed, I trembled at the dubiousthoughts of what I might uncover. Some secrets of inner earth are not good for mankind, andthis seemed to me one of them.

My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved; after a while standing in thelarge hole I had made. With the deepening of the hole, which was about six feet square, theevil smell increased; and I lost all doubt of my imminent contact with the hellish thing whoseemanations had cursed the house for over a century and a half. I wondered what it would looklike—what its form and substance would be, and how big it might have waxed through longages 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 Imight empty them all down the aperture in quick succession. After that I dumped earth only alongthe other two sides; working more slowly and donning my gas-mask as the smell grew. I was nearlyunnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.

Suddenly my spade struck something softer than earth. I shuddered, and madea 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 surfaceI uncovered was fishy and glassy—a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestionsof translucency. I scraped further, and saw that it had form. There was a rift where a partof the substance was folded over. The exposed area was huge and roughly cylindrical; like amammoth 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 contentsone after another down that charnel gulf and upon the unthinkable abnormality whose titan
elbow I had seen.

The blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellow vapour which surged tempestuouslyup from that hole as the floods of acid descended, will never leave my memory. All along thehill people tell of the yellow day, when virulent and horrible fumes arose from the factorywaste dumped in the Providence River, but I know how mistaken they are as to the source. Theytell, too, of the hideous roar which at the same time came from some disordered water-pipe orgas 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, whichI had to handle after the fumes had begun to penetrate my mask; but when I recovered I saw thatthe hole was emitting no fresh vapours.

The two remaining carboys I emptied down without particular result, and aftera 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 fungihad withered to a kind of harmless greyish powder which blew ash-like along the floor. One ofearth’s nethermost terrors had perished forever; and if there be a hell, it had receivedat last the daemon soul of an unhallowed thing. And as I patted down the last spadeful of mould,I shed the first of the many tears with which I have paid unaffected tribute to my beloved uncle’smemory.

The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunnedhouse’s terraced garden, and shortly afterward Carrington Harris rented the place. Itis still spectral, but its strangeness fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with my reliefa 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 birdsnested in their gnarled boughs.

I. The Horror in Clay.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlateall 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 willopen up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shalleither go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety ofa new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle whereinour world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals interms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from themthat there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it andmaddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out froman accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper itemand 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 thatthe professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would havedestroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the deathof my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University,Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions,and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing atthe age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurityof 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 whohad come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a shortcut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians were unableto find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesionof the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsiblefor the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclinedto wonder—and more than wonder.

As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower,I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved hisentire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlatedwill be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box whichI found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It hadbeen locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ringwhich the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, butwhen I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. Forwhat 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 mostsuperficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for thisapparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about fiveby six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modernin atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many andwild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing.And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory,despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identifythis particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.

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

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings,in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretence to literary style. What seemedto be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT “ in characters painstakingly printedto avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. The manuscript was divided into twosections, the first of which was headed “1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox,7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative of Inspector John R.Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, &Prof. Webb’s Acct. “ The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of themaccounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophicalbooks 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 topassages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer’s Golden Boughand Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded tooutré mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appearsthat on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called uponProfessor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh.His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognised him as the youngestson of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture atthe 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 childhoodexcited 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 ancientcommercial 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 ofaesthetes 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 sculptorabruptly asked for the benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in identifying thehieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose andalienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshnessof the tablet implied kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder,which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantasticallypoetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which I have since found highlycharacteristic of him. He said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dreamof strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, orgarden-girdled Babylon. “

It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleepingmemory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor thenight before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox’s imaginationhad been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopeancities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister withlatent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined pointbelow had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmuteinto 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 disturbedProfessor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almostfrantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and cladonly in his night-clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed hisold age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorialdesign. Many of his questions seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor, especially those whichtried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understandthe repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membershipin some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convincedthat the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged hisvisitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the firstinterview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startlingfragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of darkand dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmaticalsense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are thoserendered by the letters“ Cthulhu “and “ R’lyeh “.

On March 23d, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiriesat his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken tothe home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several otherartists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousnessand delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept closewatch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned tobe in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; andthe doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included not only a repetition ofwhat 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 franticwords, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with thenameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object,the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man’s subsidence into lethargy.His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was otherwisesuch as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.

On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenlyceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant ofwhat had happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by hisphysician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no furtherassistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and my uncle keptno record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughlyusual visions.

Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of thescattered notes gave me much material for thought—so much, in fact, that only the ingrainedscepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. Thenotes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the sameperiod as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, hadquickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friendswhom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, andthe dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems to havebeen varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinaryman 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 andbusiness—New England’s traditional “salt of the earth “—gave analmost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressionsappear here and there, always between March 23d and April 2nd—the period of young Wilcox’sdelirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases of vague description suggestfugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of somethingabnormal.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I knowthat panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking theiroriginal letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of havingedited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That iswhy I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed,had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a disturbingtale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things,the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor’sdelirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds notunlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of thegigantic 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 monthslater after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell. Had my unclereferred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted some corroborationand personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these,however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the objects of the professor’squestioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall everreach 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. Herewas a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shockingcry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanaticdeduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A despatch from California describes a theosophistcolony as donning white robes en masse for some “glorious fulfilment “ which neverarrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end ofMarch. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. Americanofficers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemenare mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The west of Ireland,too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangsa blasphemous “Dream Landscape “ in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerousare the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medicalfraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunchof cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism withwhich I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older mattersmentioned by the professor.

II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.

The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant tomy 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 theunknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “ Cthulhu “;and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued youngWilcox with queries and demands for data.

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

The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest forthe entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the wayfrom New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His namewas John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he borethe subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuettewhose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse hadthe least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was promptedby purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, hadbeen captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid ona supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, thatthe 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, absolutelynothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore whichmight 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 offeringcreated. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into astate of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutivefigure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently atunopened 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 ofunplaceable stone.

The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and carefulstudy, 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 whoseface was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and forefeet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnaturalmalignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular blockor pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edgeof 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 thebottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facialfeelers 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 sourcewas so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not onelink did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation’s youth—orindeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for thesoapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothingfamiliar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; andno member present, despite a representation of half the world’s expert learning in thisfield, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like thesubject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as weknow it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which ourworld and our conceptions have no part.

And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat atthe Inspector’s problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch ofbizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidenceof the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropologyin 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 inscriptionswhich he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered asingular 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 whichother Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it hadcome down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless ritesand human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elderdevil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy froman aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knewhow. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and aroundwhich 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. Andso far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thingnow 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 withquestions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men hadarrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongstthe diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a momentof really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of thephrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, boththe Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols wassomething very like this—the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks inthe phrase as chanted aloud:

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

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

On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summonsfrom the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natureddescendants of Lafitte’s men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing whichhad stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terriblesort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since themalevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods whereno dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants anddancing 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 setout in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passableroad they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woodswhere day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, andnow and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint ofmorbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined tocreate. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hystericaldwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-tomswas now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals whenthe wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyondendless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowedsquatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, soInspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horrorthat 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 unglimpsedby mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; andsquatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worshipit at midnight. They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, beforethe 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 presentvoodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was badenough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than theshocking sounds and incidents.

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

Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight ofthe spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic crywhich the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on theface 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’sextent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribablehorde 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 greatgranite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness,rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervalswith the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of thehelpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippersjumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endlessBacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which inducedone of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritualfrom some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. Thisman, 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 shiningeyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had beenhearing 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 thethrong, 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-sevensullen 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 improvisedstretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removedand carried back by Legrasse.

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, theprisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Mostwere seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguesefrom the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But beforemany questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negrofetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprisingconsistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before therewere 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 tothe first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisonerssaid it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark placesall over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in themighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneathhis sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would alwaysbe waiting to liberate him.

Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture couldnot extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapescame out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No manhad ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether ornot the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things weretold 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 Cthulhuwaits dreaming. “

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

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations oftheosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeonswhen other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he saidthe deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands inthe Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which couldrevive 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 fleshand blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?—but thatshape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to worldthrough the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longerlived, 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 theearth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serveto liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them frommaking an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncountedmillions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their modeof speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinitiesof chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by mouldingtheir dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idolswhich the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult wouldnever die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu fromHis 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 andevil, 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 enjoythemselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhilethe cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadowforth the prophecy of their return.

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams,but then something had happened. The great stone city R’lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres,had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through whichnot even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, andhigh-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out ofthe earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked upin caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cuthimself 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 saidthat he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City ofPillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and wasvirtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathlessChinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab AbdulAlhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

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

The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse’s tale, corroboratedas 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 firstcare of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some timelent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter’s death it was returned to him andremains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, andunmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.

That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, forwhat thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of thecult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphicsof the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams uponat least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists andmongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell’s instant start on an investigation of the utmostthoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heardof the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten andcontinue the mystery at my uncle’s expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collectedby the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and theextravagance 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 anthropologicalnotes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor andgive 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 hideousVictorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed frontamidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finestGeorgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from thespecimens 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 willone 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 knockand asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest;for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explainedthe reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with somesubtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, forhe spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuumhad influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost mademe shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the originalof this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensiblyunder his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he reallyknew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism had letfall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possiblyhave received the weird impressions.

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terriblevividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddlysaid, was all wrong —and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mentalcalling from underground: “ Cthulhu fhtagn “, “ Cthulhu fhtagn “.These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigilin 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 massof his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, ithad found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue Inow beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth wasof a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; butI 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 visionsof personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talkedwith Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questionedsuch of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead forsome years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more thana detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure thatI was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery wouldmake me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, asI wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidenceof 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 myuncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from anancient 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 wouldnot be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as ancientlyknown as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone;but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of myuncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think ProfessorAngell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether Ishall 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 merechance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which Iwould naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of anAustralian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cuttingbureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle’sresearch.

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 curatorof a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughlyset on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picturein one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I havementioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picturewas a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had foundin the swamp.

Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item indetail; 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 immediateaction. It read as follows:

The Morrison Co.‘s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morningat its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steamyacht 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 drivenconsiderably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12ththe derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to containone survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for morethan a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a footin height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and theMuseum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he foundin the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.

This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story ofpiracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had beensecond mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widelysouth 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-lookingcrew 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 witha peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. TheEmma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sinkfrom shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her,grappling with the savage crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all,the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate thoughrather clumsy mode of fighting.

Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First MateGreen, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigatethe captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their orderingback had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, althoughnone is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, thoughJohansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their fallinginto a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manageher, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the12th 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 orexposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as anisland trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious groupof 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. OurAuckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansenis described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the wholematter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak morefreely than he has done hitherto.

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

March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—theearthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had dartedeagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artistshad begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded inhis sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on anunknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed aheightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilstan architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of thisstorm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emergedunharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of oldCastro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult andtheir mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’spower to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second ofApril 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 hostadieu 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 oneinland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted onthe distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turnedwhite after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter soldhis cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirringexperience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and allthey could do was to give me his Oslo address.

After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and membersof the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at CircularQuay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image withits cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in theMuseum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisiteworkmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangenessof material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the curatortold me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it.Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones:“They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them. “

Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolvedto visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked at once for the Norwegiancapital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen’saddress, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the nameof 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 andancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and Iwas stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was nomore.

He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of“technical matters “ as he said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguardher from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburgdock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailorsat once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physiciansfound no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.

I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave metill I, too, am at rest; “accidentally “ or otherwise. Persuading the widow thatmy connexion with her husband’s “technical matters “ was sufficient to entitleme to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It wasa simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—andstrove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatimin all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the soundof the water against the vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped myears with cotton.

Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city andthe Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselesslybehind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars whichdream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose themon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to thesun 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 forceof that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors thatfilled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when heldup by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret as he wrote ofher bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significanthorror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destructionseem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness broughtagainst his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosityin their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar stickingout of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9’, W. Longitude 126° 43’ come upon a coast-lineof mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangiblesubstance of earth’s supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, thatwas built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped downfrom the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults andsending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreamsof the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberationand 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 citadelwhereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extentof all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen andhis men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and musthave guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at theunbelievable 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 imagefound in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate’sfrightened description.

Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very closeto 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 greatto belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images andhieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox hadtold me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he sawwas 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 outfrom this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazilyelusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewedconvexity.

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

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith andshouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carveddoor 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 aroundit, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outsidecellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could notbe sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everythingelse seemed phantasmally variable.

Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan feltover it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminablyalong the grotesque stone moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing wasnot after all horizontal—and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be sovast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; andthey saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamband rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carvenportal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, sothat all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousnesswas indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as oughtto 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 membraneouswings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-earedHawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyonewas listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinousgreen immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city ofmadness.

Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Ofthe six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursedinstant. The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shriekingand 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 wentmad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, thegreen, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, andwhat 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 restthem, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and Ångstrom.Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crustedrock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn’thave been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Bridenand Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainousmonstrosity 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 allhands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and downbetween wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrorsof that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry ofthat charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibberedlike 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 strokesof cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughingat 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 overtakethe Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting theengine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mightyeddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the braveNorwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean frothlike the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly upto the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a burstingas of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousandopened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the shipwas befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seethingastern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawnwas nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widenedevery second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin andattended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did nottry to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of hissoul. 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 throughreeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moonand 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-admiraltycourt, 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 deathcame, 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 besidethe bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—thistest of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced togetheragain. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies ofspring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think mylife 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 hasshielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilantsailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and pranceand slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinkingwhilst 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 waitsand dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come—butI must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executorsmay put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.

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 tortureno longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do notthink from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read thesehastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must haveforgetfulness or death.

It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacificthat the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The greatwar was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunkto their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of hercrew 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 escapealone 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 somewhatsouth 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. Butneither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastnessesof unbroken blue.

The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for myslumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awaked, it was todiscover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended aboutme in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distanceaway.

Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder atso prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified thanastonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilledme to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of otherless describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. PerhapsI should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolutesilence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save avast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the hom*ogeneity ofthe landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.

The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in itscloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I crawled into thestranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my position. Through some unprecedentedvolcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposingregions 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 detectthe faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I might. Nor were there any sea-fowlto prey upon the dead things.

For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon itsside 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 travellingpurposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myselfa pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanishedsea and possible rescue.

On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. Theodour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind soslight 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 thatobject seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I attainedthe 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 toascend, I slept in the shadow of the hill.

I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantasticallygibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration, determinedto sleep no more. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again. Andin the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of theparching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to performthe ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my pack, I started for the crest of theeminence.

I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source ofvague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the moundand looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses themoon had not yet soared high enough to illumine. I felt myself on the edge of the world; peeringover the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscencesof Paradise Lost, and of Satan’s hideous climb through the unfashioned realms ofdarkness.

As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of thevalley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock affordedfairly easy foot-holds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivitybecame very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled withdifficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian deepswhere no light had yet penetrated.

All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on theopposite slope, which rose steeply about an hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamedwhitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was merely a gigantic pieceof stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct impression that its contourand position were not altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensationsI cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which hadyawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that thestrange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhapsthe worship of living and thinking creatures.

Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist’sor archaeologist’s delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now nearthe zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, andrevealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of sightin both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, thewavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith; on whose surface I could now trace bothinscriptions 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 conventionalisedaquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Severalcharacters obviously represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whosedecomposing 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 arrayof bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Doré. I think that thesethings were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatureswere shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at somemonolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I darenot speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imaginationof 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 scenicbackground; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented asbut 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 orseafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestorof the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a pastbeyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon castqueer reflections on the silent channel before me.

Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to thesurface, 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 itsgigantic 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 backto the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly whenI was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I reachedthe boat; at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature uttersonly in her wildest moods.

When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thitherby the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean. In my deliriumI had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention. Of any land upheavalin the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thingwhich I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amusedhim 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 seethe thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn meinto its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full accountfor the information or the contemptuous amusem*nt of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if itcould not all have been a pure phantasm–a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken andraving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but everdoes there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep seawithout shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and flounderingon its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesseson submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above thebillows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind–ofa 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 bodylumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

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

The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadianshave tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not becauseof anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined.The place is not good for the imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It mustbe this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anythinghe recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is theonly one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this becausehis 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 straightwhere the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curvingfar toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returningwilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded forthe new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber farbelow blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets ofthe strange days will be one with the deep’s secrets; one with the hidden lore of oldocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.

When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they toldme the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town fullof witch legends I thought the evil must be something which grandams had whispered to childrenthrough 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 westwardtangle of glens and slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything besides its own eldermystery. 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 inthe dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infiniteyears of decay.

In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were littlehillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, andsometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtivewild 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 chiaroscurowere awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleepin. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcutin a tale of terror.

But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the momentI 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 havingseen 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 those five acres of grey desolation that sprawled opento the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the northof the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an odd reluctanceabout 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 ashwhich no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and manydead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricksand stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandonedwell 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 frightenedwhispers of Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the placemust have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walkedcircuitously back to the town by the curving road on the south. I vaguely wished some cloudswould 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 whatwas meant by that phrase “strange days” which so many evasively muttered. I couldnot, however, get any good answers, except that all the mystery was much more recent than Ihad dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime ofthose who spoke. It had happened in the ’eighties, and a family had disappeared or waskilled. Speakers would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to oldAmmi Pierce’s crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he livedalone in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick. It wasa fearsomely archaic place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour which clings abouthouses that have stood too long. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, andwhen he shuffled timidly to the door I could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feebleas I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and whitebeard made him seem very worn and dismal. Not knowing just how he could best be launched onhis tales, I feigned a matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questionsabout the district. He was far brighter and more educated than I had been led to think, andbefore 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. Fromhim there were no protests at the miles of old wood and farmland to be blotted out, though perhapsthere would have been had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief wasall that he shewed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through which he had roamedall 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 rightforefinger began to point shakily and impressively.

It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and whisperedon I shivered again and again despite the summer day. Often I had to recall the speaker fromramblings, 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 doneI did not wonder that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speakmuch of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to have the starscome out above me in the open; and the next day returned to Boston to give up my position. Icould not go into that dim chaos of old forest and slope again, or face another time that greyblasted heath where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoirwill 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, notwhen 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 hadbeen no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were notfeared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court besidea curious stone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their fantasticdusk 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 itselfin the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the house which had stoodwhere the blasted heath was to come—the trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertilegardens and orchards.

Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and had dropped in atAmmi Pierce’s on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were fixed verystrongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic Universitywho hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and hadwondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointedout the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweepin 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’shammer and found it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and theygouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took itin an old pail borrowed from Nahum’s kitchen, for even the small piece refused to growcool. 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 professorshad trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi’s they told him whatqueer things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a glassbeaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone’s affinityfor silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothingat all and shewing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the boraxbead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, includingthat of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the darkits luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college ina state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shiningbands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of newelements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wontto say when faced by the unknown.

Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Waterdid nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed andspattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things,but recognised some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were ammoniaand caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but althoughthe weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling,there was no change in the solvents to shew that they had attacked the substance at all. Itwas a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersionin the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmannstätten figures foundon meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very considerable, the testing was carried on inglass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the original fragmentduring the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only acharred 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 morehe went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his wife did notaccompany him. It had now most certainly shrunk, and even the sober professors could not doubtthe 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 daybefore, it was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its surface curiouslyas 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 hom*ogeneous.

They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule imbeddedin the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strangespectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called itcolour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittlenessand hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst witha 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 probablethat others would be discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away.

Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globulesby drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen—which proved, however, asbaffling in the laboratory as its predecessor had been. Aside from being almost plastic, havingheat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids, possessing an unknownspectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as aresult, it presented no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the collegescientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, buta piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outsidelaws.

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

As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiatesponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At least one Bostondaily 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 farmsteadin the valley. He and Ammi exchanged visits frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothingbut praise for him after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place hadattracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks. That July and August werehot, 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 morethan 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 tophenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered tohandle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment; for of all that gorgeousarray of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of thepears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallestof bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahumsadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he declared that the meteoritehad poisoned the soil, and thanked heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lotalong 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 havegrown taciturn; and were far from steady in their churchgoing or their attendance at the varioussocial events of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be found, thoughall the household confessed now and then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahumhimself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certainfootprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, andfoxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their natureand arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristicof the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listenedwithout interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum’s house in hissleigh on the way back from Clark’s Corners. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had runacross 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 gaveNahum’s tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quiveringevery 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 bodyseemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on anexpression 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 thepeople of the countryside. But the shying of the horses near Nahum’s house had nowbecome an acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast takingform.

People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum’s than it did anywhereelse, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter’s general store at Clark’sCorners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner’s in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbagescoming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seenbefore, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes weremonstrous, 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 plantsof that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before wasfreely 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 foundthat 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 folklorewere very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbagesare more or less odd in shape and odour and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stonehad entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and frightenedhorses—of course this was mere country talk which such a phenomenon as the aërolitewould 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 daysthe professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when given two phials of dust foranalysis in a police job over a year and a half later, recalled that the queer colour of thatskunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light shewn by the meteor fragmentin the college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from theabyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later theylost the property.

The trees budded prematurely around Nahum’s, and at night they swayedominously in the wind. Nahum’s second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that theyswayed 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, rathera product of moments when consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such momentsincreased week by week, till it became common speech that “something was wrong with allNahum’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 anyonewho saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham and shewed them to the editor of the Gazette,but that dignitary did no more than write a humorous article about them, in which the dark fearsof rustics were held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum’s to tell a stolidcity man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connexionwith these saxifrages.

April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuseof 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 theyard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connectwith the proper flora of the region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen exceptin the green grass and leafa*ge; but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased,underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The Dutchman’sbreeches became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromaticperversion. 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 andsowed 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 drawall the poison from the soil. He was prepared for almost anything now, and had grown used tothe sense of something near him waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbourstold on him, of course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being at schooleach day; but they could not help being frightened by the gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitiveyouth, suffered the most.

In May the insects came, and Nahum’s place became a nightmare of buzzingand crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and motions, andtheir nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience. The Gardners took to watching atnight—watching in all directions at random for something . . . they couldnot tell what. It was then that they all 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 mapleagainst a moonlit sky. The boughs surely moved, and there was no wind. It must be the sap. Strangenesshad come into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum’s family at all who madethe next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and what they could not see was glimpsed bya 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 thatall 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 thedarkness 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 phosphorescenceappeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.

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

It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor’s fall, andthe poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her ravingthere was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changedand fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something was takenaway—she was being drained of something—something was fastening itself on her thatought not to be—someone must make it keep off—nothing was ever still in the night—thewalls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander aboutthe house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changedhe did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the wayshe made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased tospeak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion thatshe 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 arousedthem in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemedvirtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all boltedout like frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they wereseen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each onehad to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but foundit would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the end he could do nothingbut drive it into the yard while the men used their own strength to get the heavy wagon nearenough the hayloft for convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning greyand brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruitwas coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and goldenrod bloomed grey and distorted,and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking thingsthat Nahum’s oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about thattime, 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, andNahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His wife now hadspells 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 oneof his rare visits, who first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an eviltaste that was not exactly foetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig anotherwell 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 continuedto use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagreand 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 anotherworld 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 witha pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsinginto an inane titter or a whisper about “the moving colours down there “. Two inone family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for aweek until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room acrossthe hall from his mother’s. The way they screamed at each other from behind their lockeddoors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terriblelanguage that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully imaginative, and his restlessnesswas 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. Poultryturned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogsgrew 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 veterinarywould approach his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swinebegan growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzlesdeveloped singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from thetainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole bodywould be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations werecommon. In the last stages—and death was always the result—there would be a greyingand turning brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of poison, forall the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling things could havebrought the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through solid obstacles? It must beonly natural disease—yet what disease could wreak such results was beyond any mind’sguessing. When the harvest came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stockand poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three in number, had all vanishedone night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some time before, but theirgoing was scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had madepets of the graceful felines.

On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi’s house with hideousnews. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come in a way whichcould not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot behind the farm, and hadput therein what he found. There could have been nothing from outside, for the small barredwindow and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and hiswife consoled the stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terrorseemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence of one in thehouse was a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi accompanied Nahum home with thegreatest 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 whathis father told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin’sscreams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an inquiring look Nahum saidthat his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached, Ammi managed to get away; fornot even friendship could make him stay in that spot when the faint glow of the vegetation beganand the trees may or may not have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that hewas not more imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had hebeen able to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must inevitably have turneda total maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervouschild ringing horribly in his ears.

Three days later Nahum lurched 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 listenedin a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this time. He was gone. He had gone out late atnight with a lantern and pail for water, and had never come back. He’d been going to piecesfor days, and hardly knew what he was about. Screamed at everything. There had been a franticshriek from the yard then, but before the father could get to the door, the boy was gone. Therewas no glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace. At the time Nahumthought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when dawn came, and the man had plodded backfrom his all-night search of the woods and fields, he had found some very curious things nearthe well. There was a crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainlybeen the lantern; while a bent bail and twisted iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemedto hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce wasblank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could give no guess. Merwin wasgone, 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 feltand heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if theysurvived him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, sincehe 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 whatmight have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a visit. There was nosmoke from the great chimney, and for a moment the visitor was apprehensive of the worst. Theaspect 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 clawingup at the grey November sky with a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel had comefrom some subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum was alive, after all. He wasweak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but perfectly conscious and able to givesimple orders to Zenas. The room was deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shoutedhuskily to Zenas for more wood. Wood, indeed, was sorely needed; since the cavernous fireplacewas unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot blowing about in the chill wind that came down thechimney. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him any more comfortable, andthen Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord had broken at last, and the hapless farmer’smind was proof against more sorrow.

Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missingZenas. “In the well—he lives in the well— “ was all that the cloudedfather would say. Then there flashed across the visitor’s mind a sudden thought of themad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry. “Nabby? Why, here she is! “ was thesurprised response of poor Nahum, and Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. Leavingthe harmless babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door and climbedthe creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close and noisome up there, and no sound couldbe heard from any direction. Of the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this hetried various keys on the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after somefumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.

It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by thecrude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor. The stench wasbeyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had to retreat to another room and returnwith 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 momentarycloud eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if by some hatefulcurrent of vapour. Strange colours danced before his eyes; and had not a present horror numbedhim he would have thought of the globule in the meteor that the geologist’s hammer hadshattered, and of the morbid vegetation that had sprouted in the spring. As it was he thoughtonly of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had sharedthe nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about this horrorwas that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.

Ammi would give me no added particulars to this scene, but the shape in thecorner 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 thatno moving thing was left in that attic room, and that to leave anything capable of motion therewould have been a deed so monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyonebut a stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that lowdoorway and locked the accursed secret behind him. There would be Nahum to deal with now; hemust 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. Heeven thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously the clammy vapourwhich had brushed by him in that frightful room above. What presence had his cry and entry startedup? Halted by some vague fear, he heard still further sounds below. Indubitably there was asort of heavy dragging, and a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean speciesof suction. With an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably ofwhat 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 ofthe 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 steps—and mercifulheaven! . . . 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, followedat once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse and buggy hadgone 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—itmust have been the well. He had left Hero untied near it, and a buggy-wheel must have brushedthe coping and knocked in a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestablyancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it built before 1670, and the gambrelroof not later than 1730.

A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and Ammi’sgrip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some purpose. Slowly nervinghimself, he finished his descent and walked boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not completethe walk, because what he sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was stillalive after a fashion. Whether it had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any externalforce, Ammi could not say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the lasthalf-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far advanced. There was ahorrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but lookedhorrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a face. “What was it, Nahum—whatwas it? “ he whispered, and the cleft, bulging lips were just able to crackle out a finalanswer.

“Nothin’ . . . nothin’ . . . thecolour . . . it burns . . . cold an’ wet . . .but it burns . . . it lived in the well . . . I seen it . . .a kind o’ smoke . . . jest like the flowers last spring . . .the well shone at night . . . Thad an’ Mernie 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 smashedit . . . it was that same colour . . . jest the same, like theflowers an’ plants . . . must a’ ben more of ‘em . . .seeds . . . seeds . . . they growed . . . I seenit 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 gits ye . . . burns ye up . . . in the well water . . .you was right about that . . . evil water . . . Zenas never comeback from the well . . . can’t git away . . . draws ye . . .ye know summ’at’s comin’, but ‘tain’t no use . . . Iseen it time an’ agin senct Zenas was took . . . whar’s Nabby,Ammi? . . . my head’s no good . . . dun’t know how long senctI fed her . . . it’ll git her ef we ain’t keerful . . .jest a colour . . . her face is gettin’ to hev that colour sometimes towardsnight . . . an’ it burns an’ sucks . . . it come fromsome place whar things ain’t as they is here . . . one o’ them professorssaid so . . . he was right . . . look out, Ammi, it’ll dosuthin’ more . . . sucks the life out. . . . “

But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had completelycaved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and reeled out the back doorinto the fields. He climbed the slope to the ten-acre pasture and stumbled home by the northroad and the woods. He could not pass that well from which his horse had run away. He had lookedat it through the window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurchingbuggy had not dislodged anything after all—the splash had been something else—somethingwhich went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum. . . .

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

The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi’s buggy, andarrived at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o’clock. Used as the officers were togruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was found in the attic and under thered checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole aspect of the farm with its grey desolationwas terrible enough, but those two crumbling objects were beyond all bounds. No one could looklong 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 hereit develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college laboratory where the twophials 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 yieldedin the previous year. The property of emitting this spectrum vanished in a month, the dust thereafterconsisting mainly of alkaline phosphates and carbonates.

Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they meantto 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 detectivequestioned him he admitted that Nahum had feared something down there—so much so thathe had never even thought of searching it for Merwin or Zenas. After that nothing would do butthat they empty and explore the well immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while pail afterpail of rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground outside. The men sniffedin 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 largedog in about the same state, and a number of bones of smaller animals. The ooze and slime atthe bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man who descended on hand-holds witha long pole found that he could sink the wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor withoutmeeting any solid obstruction.

Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, whenit was seen that nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone went indoors and conferredin the ancient sitting-room while the intermittent light of a spectral half-moon played wanlyon the grey desolation outside. The men were frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and couldfind no convincing common element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown diseaseof livestock 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 contraryto natural law had occurred. No doubt the meteor had poisoned the soil, but the illness of personsand 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 analyse it. But what peculiar madness could have madeboth boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar—and the fragments shewed thatthey 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 noticedthe glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent grounds seemed faintlyluminous 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 dullreflections in the little ground pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queercolour, and as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this strangebeam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had seen that colour before, andfeared to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aërolitetwo summers ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he hadseen it for an instant that very morning against the small barred window of that terrible atticroom where nameless things had happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and hatefulcurrent of vapour had brushed past him—and then poor Nahum had been taken by somethingof that colour. He had said so at the last—said it was the globule and the plants. Afterthat had come the runaway in the yard and the splash in the well—and now that well wasbelching forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same daemoniac tint.

It does credit to the alertness of Ammi’s mind that he puzzled even atthat tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but wonder athis gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a windowopening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist againstthe black and blasted landscape. It wasn’t right—it was against Nature—andhe thought of those terrible last words of his stricken friend, “It come from some placewhar things ain’t as they is here . . . one o’ them professors saidso. . . . “

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 wellthat sucks your life out. He said it must be some’at growed from a round ball like onewe 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’ttell what it is. Nahum thought it feeds on everything livin’ an’ gits stronger allthe time. He said he seen it this last week. It must be somethin’ from away off in thesky like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The way it’s madean’ the way it works ain’t like no way o’ God’s world. It’s some’atfrom beyond.”

So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger andthe hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was truly an awful moment; withterror in that ancient and accursed house itself, four monstrous sets of fragments—twofrom the house and two from the well—in the woodshed behind, and that shaft of unknownand 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 inthe attic room, but perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever knowwhat was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond had not so far hurt any humanof unweakened mind, there is no telling what it might not have done at that last moment, andwith its seemingly increased strength and the special signs of purpose it was soon to displaybeneath the half-clouded moonlit sky.

All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. Theothers looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze upward to the point at which itsidle straying had been suddenly arrested. There was no need for words. What had been disputedin country gossip was disputable no longer, and it is because of the thing which every man ofthat 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 arisenot 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 weremoving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epilepticmadness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by somealien and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below theblack roots.

Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passedover the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. At this therewas a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost identical from every throat. For theterror had not faded with the silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watcherssaw wriggling at that treetop height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance,tipping each bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that came down on the apostles’heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarmof corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh; and its colour wasthat same nameless intrusion which Ammi had come to recognise and dread. All the while the shaftof phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds ofthe huddled men a sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their consciousminds could form. It was no longer shining out, it was pouring out; and as theshapeless 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 extrabar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point for lack of a controllable voicewhen he wished to draw notice to the growing luminosity of the trees. The neighing and stampingof the horses had become utterly frightful, but not a soul of that group in the old house wouldhave 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 ofthe well-sweep was shining now, and presently a policeman dumbly pointed to some wooden shedsand bee-hives near the stone wall on the west. They were commencing to shine, too, though thetethered vehicles of the visitors seemed so far unaffected. Then there was a wild commotionand clopping in the road, and as Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they realised thatthe span of frantic greys had broke 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 medicalexaminer. No one replied, but the man who had been in the well gave a hint that his long polemust have stirred up something intangible. “It was awful, “ he added. “Therewas 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 drownedits owner’s faint quaver as he mumbled his formless reflections. “It come from thatstone . . . it growed down thar . . . it got everything livin’ . . . it fed itself on ‘em, mind and body . . . Thad an’Mernie, Zenas an’ Nabby . . . Nahum was the last . . . they all drunk the water . . . it got strong on ‘em . . . it come from beyond, whar thingsain’t like they be here . . . now it’s goin’ home. . . . “

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

Ammi shewed them the back door and the path up through the fields to the ten-acrepasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did not dare look back till they were faraway on the high ground. They were glad of the path, for they could not have gone the frontway, by that well. It was bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds, and those shining orchardtrees with their gnarled, fiendish contours; but thank heaven the branches did their worst twistinghigh up. The moon went under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic bridge over Chapman’sBrook, and it was blind groping from there to the open meadows.

When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at thebottom they saw a fearsome sight. All the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend ofcolour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed tolethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foulflame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepolesof the house, barn, and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the restreigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of crypticpoison from the well—seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, andmalignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognisable chromaticism.

Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky likea rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and curiously regularhole 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 theunknown colour had melted into the Milky Way. But his gaze was the next moment called swiftlyto 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, forin one feverish, kaleidoscopic instant there burst up from that doomed and accursed farm a gleaminglyeruptive cataclysm of unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who sawit, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic fragmentsas our universe must needs disown. Through quickly re-closing vapours they followed the greatmorbidity that had vanished, and in another second they had vanished too. Behind and below wasonly a darkness to which the men dared not return, and all about was a mounting wind which seemedto sweep down in black, frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashedthe fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the trembling party realisedit would be no use waiting for the moon to shew what was left down there at Nahum’s.

Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward Arkhamby the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and begged them to see him inside his ownkitchen, instead of keeping straight on to town. He did not wish to cross the nighted, wind-whippedwoods alone to his home on the main road. For he had had an added shock that the others werespared, and was crushed forever with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many yearsto come. As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set their faces towardthe road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the shadowed valley of desolation so lately shelteringhis 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 thesky. It was just a colour—but not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammirecognised that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down there inthe well, he has never been quite right since.

Ammi would never go near the place again. It is over half a century now sincethe horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new reservoir blotsit out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around themouth of that abandoned well I passed. I hope the water will always be very deep—but evenso, I shall never drink it. I do not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Threeof the men who had been with Ammi returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, butthere were not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the cellar, somemineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of that nefandous well. Save for Ammi’sdead 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 greatspot eaten by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared glimpse it in spiteof the rural tales have named it “the blasted heath”.

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

They say the mental influences are very bad, too. Numbers went queer in theyears after Nahum’s taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then the stronger-mindedfolk 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 stores of whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are veryhorrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough tostir a morbid fancy. No traveller 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 spirit as of theeye. I myself am curious about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi toldme his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidityabout 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 noone but Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the strange days, and all threeprofessors who saw the aërolite and its coloured globule are dead. There were other globules—dependupon that. One must have fed itself and escaped, and probably there was another which was toolate. No doubt it is still down the well—I know there was something wrong with the sunlightI saw above that miasmal brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhapsthere is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever daemon hatchling is there, itmust be tethered to something or else it would quickly spread. Is it fastened to the roots ofthose trees that claw the air? One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shineand move as they ought not to do at night.

What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi describedwould be called a gas, but this gas obeyed laws that are not of our cosmos. This was no fruitof 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 deemtoo vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformedrealms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns thebrain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think his talewas all a freak of madness as the townfolk had forewarned. Something terrible came to the hillsand valleys on that meteor, and something terrible—though I know not in what proportion—stillremains. 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 beenable 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 onhim. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more andmore in troubling my sleep.

The Curse of Yig

In 1925 I went into Oklahoma looking for snake lore, and I came out with a fear of snakes thatwill last me the rest of my life. I admit it is foolish, since there are natural explanationsfor everything I saw and heard, but it masters me none the less. If the old story had been allthere was to it, I would not have been so badly shaken. My work as an American Indian ethnologisthas hardened me to all kinds of extravagant legendry, and I know that simple white people canbeat the redskins at their own game when it comes to fanciful inventions. But I can’t forgetwhat I saw with my own eyes at the insane asylum in Guthrie.

I called at that asylum because a few of the oldest settlers told me I wouldfind something important there. Neither Indians nor white men would discuss the snake-god legendsI had come to trace. The oil-boom newcomers, of course, knew nothing of such matters, and thered men and old pioneers were plainly frightened when I spoke of them. Not more than six orseven people mentioned the asylum, and those who did were careful to talk in whispers. But thewhisperers said that Dr. McNeill could shew me a very terrible relic and tell me all I wantedto know. He could explain why Yig, the half-human father of serpents, is a shunned and fearedobject in central Oklahoma, and why old settlers shiver at the secret Indian orgies which makethe autumn days and nights hideous with the ceaseless beating of tom-toms in lonely places.

It was with the scent of a hound on the trail that I went to Guthrie, for Ihad spent many years collecting data on the evolution of serpent-worship among the Indians.I had always felt, from well-defined undertones of legend and archaeology, that great Quetzalcoatl—benignsnake-god of the Mexicans—had had an older and darker prototype; and during recent monthsI had well-nigh proved it in a series of researches stretching from Guatemala to the Oklahomaplains. But everything was tantalising and incomplete, for above the border the cult of thesnake was hedged about by fear and furtiveness.

Now it appeared that a new and copious source of data was about to dawn, andI sought the head of the asylum with an eagerness I did not try to cloak. Dr. McNeill was asmall, clean-shaven man of somewhat advanced years, and I saw at once from his speech and mannerthat he was a scholar of no mean attainments in many branches outside his profession. Graveand doubtful when I first made known my errand, his face grew thoughtful as he carefully scannedmy credentials and the letter of introduction which a kindly old ex-Indian agent had givenme.

“So you’ve been studying the Yig legend, eh?” he reflected sententiously.“I know that many of our Oklahoma ethnologists have tried to connect it with Quetzalcoatl,but I don’t think any of them have traced the intermediate steps so well. You’ve doneremarkable work for a man as young as you seem to be, and you certainly deserve all the datawe can give.”

“I don’t suppose old Major Moore or any of the others told you whatit is I have here. They don’t like to talk about it, and neither do I. It is very tragicand very horrible, but that is all. I refuse to consider it anything supernatural. There’sa story about it that I’ll tell you after you see it—a devilish sad story, but onethat I won’t call magic. It merely shews the potency that belief has over some people.I’ll admit there are times when I feel a shiver that’s more than physical, but indaylight I set all that down to nerves. I’m not a young fellow any more, alas!”

“To come to the point, the thing I have is what you might call a victimof Yig’s curse—a physically living victim. We don’t let the bulk of the nursessee it, although most of them know it’s here. There are just two steady old chaps whomI let feed it and clean out its quarters—used to be three, but good old Stevens passedon a few years ago. I suppose I’ll have to break in a new group pretty soon; for the thingdoesn’t seem to age or change much, and we old boys can’t last forever. Maybe theethics of the near future will let us give it a merciful release, but it’s hard to tell.”

“Did you see that single ground-glass basem*nt window over in the eastwing when you came up the drive? That’s where it is. I’ll take you there myself now.You needn’t make any comment. Just look through the moveable panel in the door and thankGod the light isn’t any stronger. Then I’ll tell you the story—or as much asI’ve been able to piece together.”

We walked downstairs very quietly, and did not talk as we threaded the corridorsof the seemingly deserted basem*nt. Dr. McNeill unlocked a grey-painted steel door, but it wasonly a bulkhead leading to a further stretch of hallway. At length he paused before a door markedB 116, opened a small observation panel which he could use only by standing on tiptoe, and poundedseveral times upon the painted metal, as if to arouse the occupant, whatever it might be.

A faint stench came from the aperture as the doctor unclosed it, and I fanciedhis pounding elicited a kind of low, hissing response. Finally he motioned me to replace himat the peep-hole, and I did so with a causeless and increasing tremor. The barred, ground-glasswindow, close to the earth outside, admitted only a feeble and uncertain pallor; and I had tolook into the malodorous den for several seconds before I could see what was crawling and wrigglingabout on the straw-covered floor, emitting every now and then a weak and vacuous hiss. Thenthe shadowed outlines began to take shape, and I perceived that the squirming entity bore someremote resemblance to a human form laid flat on its belly. I clutched at the door-handle forsupport as I tried to keep from fainting.

The moving object was almost of human size, and entirely devoid of clothing.It was absolutely hairless, and its tawny-looking back seemed subtly squamous in the dim, ghoulishlight. Around the shoulders it was rather speckled and brownish, and the head was very curiouslyflat. As it looked up to hiss at me I saw that the beady little black eyes were damnably anthropoid,but I could not bear to study them long. They fastened themselves on me with a horrible persistence,so that I closed the panel gaspingly and left the creature to wriggle about unseen in its mattedstraw and spectral twilight. I must have reeled a bit, for I saw that the doctor was gentlyholding my arm as he guided me away. I was stuttering over and over again: “B-but for God’s sake, what is it?”

Dr. McNeill told me the story in his private office as I sprawled oppositehim in an easy-chair. The gold and crimson of late afternoon changed to the violet of earlydusk, but still I sat awed and motionless. I resented every ring of the telephone and everywhir of the buzzer, and I could have cursed the nurses and internes whose knocks now and thensummoned the doctor briefly to the outer office. Night came, and I was glad my host switchedon all the lights. Scientist though I was, my zeal for research was half forgotten amidst suchbreathless ecstasies of fright as a small boy might feel when whispered witch-tales go the roundsof the chimney-corner.

It seems that Yig, the snake-god of the central plains tribes—presumablythe primal source of the more southerly Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan—was an odd, half-anthropomorphicdevil of highly arbitrary and capricious nature. He was not wholly evil, and was usually quitewell-disposed toward those who gave proper respect to him and his children, the serpents; butin the autumn he became abnormally ravenous, and had to be driven away by means of suitablerites. That was why the tom-toms in the Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo country pounded ceaselesslyweek in and week out in August, September, and October; and why the medicine-men made strangenoises with rattles and whistles curiously like those of the Aztecs and Mayas.

Yig’s chief trait was a relentless devotion to his children—a devotionso great that the redskins almost feared to protect themselves from the venomous rattlesnakeswhich thronged the region. Frightful clandestine tales hinted of his vengeance upon mortalswho flouted him or wreaked harm upon his wriggling progeny; his chosen method being to turnhis victim, after suitable tortures, to a spotted snake.

In the old days of the Indian Territory, the doctor went on, there was notquite so much secrecy about Yig. The plains tribes, less cautious than the desert nomads andPueblos, talked quite freely of their legends and autumn ceremonies with the first Indian agents,and let considerable of the lore spread out through the neighbouring regions of white settlement.The great fear came in the land-rush days of ’89, when some extraordinary incidents hadbeen rumoured, and the rumours sustained, by what seemed to be hideously tangible proofs. Indianssaid that the new white men did not know how to get on with Yig, and afterward the settlerscame to take that theory at face value. Now no old-timer in middle Oklahoma, white or red, couldbe induced to breathe a word about the snake-god except in vague hints. Yet after all, the doctoradded with almost needless emphasis, the only truly authenticated horror had been a thing ofpitiful tragedy rather than of bewitchment. It was all very material and cruel—even thatlast phase which had caused so much dispute.

Dr. McNeill paused and cleared his throat before getting down to his specialstory, and I felt a tingling sensation as when a theatre curtain rises. The thing had begunwhen Walker Davis and his wife Audrey left Arkansas to settle in the newly opened public landsin the spring of 1889, and the end had come in the country of the Wichitas—north of theWichita River, in what is at present Caddo County. There is a small village called Binger therenow, and the railway goes through; but otherwise the place is less changed than other partsof Oklahoma. It is still a section of farms and ranches—quite productive in these days—sincethe great oil-fields do not come very close.

Walker and Audrey had come from Franklin County in the Ozarks with a canvas-toppedwagon, two mules, an ancient and useless dog called “Wolf”, and all their householdgoods. They were typical hill-folk, youngish and perhaps a little more ambitious than most,and looked forward to a life of better returns for their hard work than they had had in Arkansas.Both were lean, raw-boned specimens; the man tall, sandy, and grey-eyed, and the woman shortand rather dark, with a black straightness of hair suggesting a slight Indian admixture.

In general, there was very little of distinction about them, and but for onething their annals might not have differed from those of thousands of other pioneers who flockedinto the new country at that time. That thing was Walker’s almost epileptic fear of snakes,which some laid to prenatal causes, and some said came from a dark prophecy about his end withwhich an old Indian squaw had tried to scare him when he was small. Whatever the cause, theeffect was marked indeed; for despite his strong general courage the very mention of a snakewould cause him to grow faint and pale, while the sight of even a tiny specimen would producea shock sometimes bordering on a convulsion seizure.

The Davises started out early in the year, in the hope of being on their newland for the spring ploughing. Travel was slow; for the roads were bad in Arkansas, while inthe Territory there were great stretches of rolling hills and red, sandy barrens without anyroads whatever. As the terrain grew flatter, the change from their native mountains depressedthem more, perhaps, than they realised; but they found the people at the Indian agencies veryaffable, while most of the settled Indians seemed friendly and civil. Now and then they encountereda fellow-pioneer, with whom crude pleasantries and expressions of amiable rivalry were generallyexchanged.

Owing to the season, there were not many snakes in evidence, so Walker didnot suffer from his special temperamental weakness. In the earlier stages of the journey, too,there were no Indian snake-legends to trouble him; for the transplanted tribes from the southeastdo not share the wilder beliefs of their western neighbours. As fate would have it, it was awhite man at Okmulgee in the Creek country who gave the Davises the first hint of Yig beliefs;a hint which had a curiously fascinating effect on Walker, and caused him to ask questions veryfreely after that.

Before long Walker’s fascination had developed into a bad case of fright.He took the most extraordinary precautions at each of the nightly camps, always clearing awaywhatever vegetation he found, and avoiding stony places whenever he could. Every clump of stuntedbushes and every cleft in the great, slab-like rocks seemed to him now to hide malevolent serpents,while every human figure not obviously part of a settlement or emigrant train seemed to hima potential snake-god till nearness had proved the contrary. Fortunately no troublesome encounterscame at this stage to shake his nerves still further.

As they approached the Kickapoo country they found it harder and harder toavoid camping near rocks. Finally it was no longer possible, and poor Walker was reduced tothe puerile expedient of droning some of the rustic anti-snake charms he had learned in hisboyhood. Two or three times a snake was really glimpsed, and these sights did not help the suffererin his efforts to preserve composure.

On the twenty-second evening of the journey a savage wind made it imperative,for the sake of the mules, to camp in as sheltered a spot as possible; and Audrey persuadedher husband to take advantage of a cliff which rose uncommonly high above the dried bed of aformer tributary of the Canadian River. He did not like the rocky cast of the place, but allowedhimself to be overruled this once; leading the animals sullenly toward the protecting slope,which the nature of the ground would not allow the wagon to approach.

Audrey, examining the rocks near the wagon, meanwhile noticed a singular sniffingon the part of the feeble old dog. Seizing a rifle, she followed his lead, and presently thankedher stars that she had forestalled Walker in her discovery. For there, snugly nested in thegap between two boulders, was a sight it would have done him no good to see. Visible only asone convoluted expanse, but perhaps comprising as many as three or four separate units, wasa mass of lazy wriggling which could not be other than a brood of new-born rattlesnakes.

Anxious to save Walker from a trying shock, Audrey did not hesitate to act,but took the gun firmly by the barrel and brought the butt down again and again upon the writhingobjects. Her own sense of loathing was great, but it did not amount to a real fear. Finallyshe saw that her task was done, and turned to cleanse the improvised bludgeon in the red sandand dry, dead grass near by. She must, she reflected, cover the nest up before Walker got backfrom tethering the mules. Old Wolf, tottering relic of mixed shepherd and coyote ancestry thathe was, had vanished, and she feared he had gone to fetch his master.

Footsteps at that instant proved her fear well founded. A second more, andWalker had seen everything. Audrey made a move to catch him if he should faint, but he did nomore than sway. Then the look of pure fright on his bloodless face turned slowly to somethinglike mingled awe and anger, and he began to upbraid his wife in trembling tones.

“Gawd’s sake, Aud, but why’d ye go for to do that? Hain’tye heerd all the things they’ve been tellin’ about this snake-devil Yig? Ye’dought to a told me, and we’d a moved on. Don’t ye know they’s a devil-god whatgets even if ye hurts his children? What for d’ye think the Injuns all dances and beatstheir drums in the fall about? This land’s under a curse, I tell ye—nigh every soulwe’ve a-talked to sence we come in’s said the same. Yig rules here, an’ he comesout every fall for to git his victims and turn ’em into snakes. Why, Aud, they won’tnone of them Injuns acrost the Canayjin kill a snake for love nor money!”

“Gawd knows what ye done to yourself, gal, a-stompin’ out a hullbrood o’ Yig’s chillen. He’ll git ye, sure, sooner or later, unlessen I kin buya charm offen some o’ the Injun medicine-men. He’ll git ye, Aud, as sure’s they’sa Gawd in heaven—he’ll come outa the night and turn ye into a crawlin’ spottedsnake!”

All the rest of the journey Walker kept up the frightened reproofs and prophecies.They crossed the Canadian near Newcastle, and soon afterward met with the first of the realplains Indians they had seen—a party of blanketed Wichitas, whose leader talked freelyunder the spell of the whiskey offered him, and taught poor Walker a long-winded protectivecharm against Yig in exchange for a quart bottle of the same inspiring fluid. By the end ofthe week the chosen site in the Wichita country was reached, and the Davises made haste to tracetheir boundaries and perform the spring ploughing before even beginning the construction ofa cabin.

The region was flat, drearily windy, and sparse of natural vegetation, butpromised great fertility under cultivation. Occasional outcroppings of granite diversified asoil of decomposed red sandstone, and here and there a great flat rock would stretch along thesurface of the ground like a man-made floor. There seemed to be a very few snakes, or possibledens for them; so Audrey at last persuaded Walker to build the one-room cabin over a vast, smoothslab of exposed stone. With such a flooring and with a good-sized fireplace the wettest weathermight be defied—though it soon became evident that dampness was no salient quality of thedistrict. Logs were hauled in the wagon from the nearest belt of woods, many miles toward theWichita Mountains.

Walker built his wide-chimneyed cabin and crude barn with the aid of some ofthe other settlers, though the nearest one was over a mile away. In turn, he helped his helpersat similar house-raisings, so that many ties of friendship sprang up between the new neighbours.There was no town worthy the name nearer than El Reno, on the railway thirty miles or more tothe northeast; and before many weeks had passed, the people of the section had become very cohesivedespite the wideness of their scattering. The Indians, a few of whom had begun to settle downon ranches, were for the most part harmless, though somewhat quarrelsome when fired by the liquidstimulation which found its way to them despite all government bans.

Of all the neighbours the Davises found Joe and Sally Compton, who likewisehailed from Arkansas, the most helpful and congenial. Sally is still alive, known now as GrandmaCompton; and her son Clyde, then an infant in arms, has become one of the leading men of thestate. Sally and Audrey used to visit each other often, for their cabins were only two milesapart; and in the long spring and summer afternoons they exchanged many a tale of old Arkansasand many a rumour about the new country.

Sally was very sympathetic about Walker’s weakness regarding snakes, butperhaps did more to aggravate than cure the parallel nervousness which Audrey was acquiringthrough his incessant praying and prophesying about the curse of Yig. She was uncommonly fullof gruesome snake stories, and produced a direfully strong impression with her acknowledgedmasterpiece—the tale of a man in Scott County who had been bitten by a whole horde of rattlersat once, and had swelled so monstrously from poison that his body had finally burst with a pop.Needless to say, Audrey did not repeat this anecdote to her husband, and she implored the Comptonsto beware of starting it on the rounds of the countryside. It is to Joe’s and Sally’scredit that they heeded this plea with the utmost fidelity.

Walker did his corn-planting early, and in midsummer improved his time by harvestinga fair crop of the native grass of the region. With the help of Joe Compton he dug a well whichgave a moderate supply of very good water, though he planned to sink an artesian later on. Hedid not run into many serious snake scares, and made his land as inhospitable as possible forwriggling visitors. Every now and then he rode over to the cluster of thatched, conical hutswhich formed the main village of the Wichitas, and talked long with the old men and shamansabout the snake-god and how to nullify his wrath. Charms were always ready in exchange for whiskey,but much of the information he got was far from reassuring.

Yig was a great god. He was bad medicine. He did not forget things. In theautumn his children were hungry and wild, and Yig was hungry and wild, too. All the tribes mademedicine against Yig when the corn harvest came. They gave him some corn, and danced in properregalia to the sound of whistle, rattle, and drum. They kept the drums pounding to drive Yigaway, and called down the aid of Tiráwa, whose children men are, even as the snakes areYig’s children. It was bad that the squaw of Davis killed the children of Yig. Let Davissay the charms many times when the corn harvest comes. Yig is Yig. Yig is a great god.

By the time the corn harvest did come, Walker had succeeded in getting hiswife into a deplorably jumpy state. His prayers and borrowed incantations came to be a nuisance;and when the autumn rites of the Indians began, there was always a distant wind-borne poundingof tom-toms to lend an added background of the sinister. It was maddening to have the muffledclatter always stealing over the wide red plains. Why would it never stop? Day and night, weekon week, it was always going in exhaustless relays, as persistently as the red dusty winds thatcarried it. Audrey loathed it more than her husband did, for he saw in it a compensating elementof protection. It was with this sense of a mighty, intangible bulwark against evil that he gotin his corn crop and prepared cabin and stable for the coming winter.

The autumn was abnormally warm, and except for their primitive cookery theDavises found scant use for the stone fireplace Walker had built with such care. Something inthe unnaturalness of the hot dust-clouds preyed on the nerves of all the settlers, but mostof all on Audrey’s and Walker’s. The notions of a hovering snake-curse and the weird,endless rhythm of the distant Indian drums formed a bad combination which any added elementof the bizarre went far to render utterly unendurable.

Notwithstanding this strain, several festive gatherings were held at one oranother of the cabins after the crops were reaped; keeping naively alive in modernity thosecurious rites of the harvest-home which are as old as human agriculture itself. Lafayette Smith,who came from southern Missouri and had a cabin about three miles east of Walker’s, wasa very passable fiddler; and his tunes did much to make the celebrants forget the monotonousbeating of the distant tom-toms. Then Hallowe’en drew near, and the settlers planned anotherfrolic—this time, had they but known it, of a lineage older than even agriculture; thedread Witch-Sabbath of the primal pre-Aryans, kept alive through ages in the midnight blacknessof secret woods, and still hinting at vague terrors under its latter-day mask of comedy andlightness. Hallowe’en was to fall on a Thursday, and the neighbours agreed to gather fortheir first revel at the Davis cabin.

It was on that thirty-first of October that the warm spell broke. The morningwas grey and leaden, and by noon the incessant winds had changed from searingness to rawness.People shivered all the more because they were not prepared for the chill, and Walker Davis’old dog Wolf dragged himself wearily indoors to a place beside the hearth. But the distant drumsstill thumped on, nor were the white citizenry less inclined to pursue their chosen rites. Asearly as four in the afternoon the wagons began to arrive at Walker’s cabin; and in theevening, after a memorable barbecue, Lafayette Smith’s fiddle inspired a very fair-sizedcompany to great feats of saltatory grotesqueness in the one good-sized but crowded room. Theyounger folk indulged in the amiable inanities proper to the season, and now and then old Wolfwould howl with doleful and spine-tickling ominousness at some especially spectral strain fromLafayette’s squeaky violin—a device he had never heard before. Mostly, though, thisbattered veteran slept through the merriment; for he was past the age of active interests andlived largely in his dreams. Tom and Jennie Rigby had brought their collie Zeke along, but thecanines did not fraternise. Zeke seemed strangely uneasy over something, and nosed around curiouslyall the evening.

Audrey and Walker made a fine couple on the floor, and Grandma Compton stilllikes to recall her impression of their dancing that night. Their worries seemed forgotten forthe nonce, and Walker was shaved and trimmed into a surprising degree of spruceness. By teno’clock all hands were healthily tired, and the guests began to depart family by familywith many handshakings and bluff assurances of what a fine time everybody had had. Tom and Jenniethought Zeke’s eerie howls as he followed them to their wagon were marks of regret at havingto go home; though Audrey said it must be the far-away tom-toms which annoyed him, for the distantthumping was surely ghastly enough after the merriment within.

The night was bitterly cold, and for the first time Walker put a great login the fireplace and banked it with ashes to keep it smouldering till morning. Old Wolf draggedhimself within the ruddy glow and lapsed into his customary coma. Audrey and Walker, too tiredto think of charms or curses, tumbled into the rough pine bed and were asleep before the cheapalarm-clock on the mantel had ticked out three minutes. And from far away, the rhythmic poundingof those hellish tom-toms still pulsed on the chill night-wind.

Dr. McNeill paused here and removed his glasses, as if a blurring of the objectiveworld might make the reminiscent vision clearer.

“You’ll soon appreciate,” he said, “that I had a greatdeal of difficulty in piecing out all that happened after the guests left. There were times,though—at first—when I was able to make a try at it.” After a moment of silencehe went on with the tale.

Audrey had terrible dreams of Yig, who appeared to her in the guise of Satanas depicted in cheap engravings she had seen. It was, indeed, from an absolute ecstasy of nightmarethat she started suddenly awake to find Walker already conscious and sitting up in bed. He seemedto be listening intently to something, and silenced her with a whisper when she began to askwhat had roused him.

“Hark, Aud!” he breathed. “Don’t ye hear somethin’a-singin’ and buzzin’ and rustlin’? D’ye reckon it’s the fall crickets?”

Certainly, there was distinctly audible within the cabin such a sound as hehad described. Audrey tried to analyse it, and was impressed with some element at once horribleand familiar, which hovered just outside the rim of her memory. And beyond it all, waking ahideous thought, the monotonous beating of the distant tom-toms came incessantly across theblack plains on which a cloudy half-moon had set.

“Walker—s’pose it’s—the—the—curse o’ Yig? “

She could feel him tremble.

“No, gal, I don’t reckon he comes that away. He’s shapen likea man, except ye look at him clost. That’s what Chief Grey Eagle says. This here’ssome varmints come in outen the cold—not crickets, I calc’late, but summat like ’em.I’d orter git up and stomp ’em out afore they make much headway or git at the cupboard.”

He rose, felt for the lantern that hung within easy reach, and rattled thetin match-box nailed to the wall beside it. Audrey sat up in bed and watched the flare of thematch grow into the steady glow of the lantern. Then, as their eyes began to take in the wholeof the room, the crude rafters shook with the frenzy of their simultaneous shriek. For the flat,rocky floor, revealed in the new-born illumination, was one seething, brown-speckled mass ofwriggling rattlesnakes, slithering toward the fire, and even now turning their loathsome headsto menace the fright-blasted lantern-bearer.

It was only for an instant that Audrey saw the things. The reptiles were ofevery size, of uncountable numbers, and apparently of several varieties; and even as she looked,two or three of them reared their heads as if to strike at Walker. She did not faint—itwas Walker’s crash to the floor that extinguished the lantern and plunged her into blackness.He had not screamed a second time—fright had paralysed him, and he fell as if shot bya silent arrow from no mortal’s bow. To Audrey the entire world seemed to whirl about fantastically,mingling with the nightmare from which she had started.

Voluntary motion of any sort was impossible, for will and the sense of realityhad left her. She fell back inertly on her pillow, hoping that she would wake soon. No actualsense of what had happened penetrated her mind for some time. Then, little by little, the suspicionthat she was really awake began to dawn on her; and she was convulsed with a mounting blendof panic and grief which made her long to shriek out despite the inhibiting spell which kepther mute.

Walker was gone, and she had not been able to help him. He had died of snakes,just as the old witch-woman had predicted when he was a little boy. Poor Wolf had not been ableto help, either—probably he had not even awaked from his senile stupor. And now the crawlingthings must be coming for her, writhing closer and closer every moment in the dark, perhapseven now twining slipperily about the bedposts and oozing up over the coarse woollen blankets.Unconsciously she crept under the clothes and trembled.

It must be the curse of Yig. He had sent his monstrous children on All-Hallows’Night, and they had taken Walker first. Why was that—wasn’t he innocent enough? Whynot come straight for her—hadn’t she killed those little rattlers alone? Then shethought of the curse’s form as told by the Indians. She wouldn’t be killed—justturned to a spotted snake. Ugh! So she would be like those things she had glimpsed on the floor—thosethings which Yig had sent to get her and enroll her among their number! She tried to mumblea charm that Walker had taught her, but found she could not utter a single sound.

The noisy ticking of the alarm-clock sounded above the maddening beat of thedistant tom-toms. The snakes were taking a long time—did they mean to delay on purposeto play on her nerves? Every now and then she thought she felt a steady, insidious pressureon the bedclothes, but each time it turned out to be only the automatic twitchings of her overwroughtnerves. The clock ticked on in the dark, and a change came slowly over her thoughts.

Those snakes couldn’t have taken so long! They couldn’t beYig’s messengers after all, but just natural rattlers that were nested below the rock andhad been drawn there by the fire. They weren’t coming for her, perhaps—perhaps theyhad sated themselves on poor Walker. Where were they now? Gone? Coiled by the fire? Still crawlingover the prone corpse of their victim? The clock ticked, and the distant drums throbbed on.

At the thought of her husband’s body lying there in the pitch blacknessa thrill of purely physical horror passed over Audrey. That story of Sally Compton’s aboutthe man back in Scott County! He, too, had been bitten by a whole bunch of rattlesnakes, andwhat had happened to him? The poison had rotted the flesh and swelled the whole corpse, andin the end the bloated thing had burst horribly—burst horribly with a detestablepopping noise. Was that what was happening to Walker down there on the rock floor? Instinctivelyshe felt she had begun to listen for something too terrible even to name to herself.

The clock ticked on, keeping a kind of mocking, sardonic time with the far-offdrumming that the night-wind brought. She wished it were a striking clock, so that she couldknow how long this eldritch vigil must last. She cursed the toughness of fibre that kept herfrom fainting, and wondered what sort of relief the dawn could bring, after all. Probably neighbourswould pass—no doubt somebody would call—would they find her still sane? Was she stillsane now?

Morbidly listening, Audrey all at once became aware of something which shehad to verify with every effort of her will before she could believe it; and which, once verified,she did not know whether to welcome or dread. The distant beating of the Indian tom-tomshad ceased. They had always maddened her—but had not Walker regarded them as a bulwarkagainst nameless evil from outside the universe? What were some of those things he had repeatedto her in whispers after talking with Grey Eagle and the Wichita medicine-men?

She did not relish this new and sudden silence, after all! There was somethingsinister about it. The loud-ticking clock seemed abnormal in its new loneliness. Capable atlast of conscious motion, she shook the covers from her face and looked into the darkness towardthe window. It must have cleared after the moon set, for she saw the square aperture distinctlyagainst the background of stars.

Then without warning came that shocking, unutterable sound—ugh!—thatdull, putrid pop of cleft skin and escaping poison in the dark. God!—Sally’sstory—that obscene stench, and this gnawing, clawing silence! It was too much. The bondsof muteness snapped, and the black night waxed reverberant with Audrey’s screams of stark,unbridled frenzy.

Consciousness did not pass away with the shock. How merciful if only it had!Amidst the echoes of her shrieking Audrey still saw the star-sprinkled square of window ahead,and heard the doom-boding ticking of that frightful clock. Did she hear another sound? Was thatsquare window still a perfect square? She was in no condition to weigh the evidence of her sensesor distinguish between fact and hallucination.

No—that window was not a perfect square. Something had encroached onthe lower edge. Nor was the ticking of the clock the only sound in the room. There was,beyond dispute, a heavy breathing neither her own nor poor Wolf’s. Wolf slept very silently,and his wakeful wheezing was unmistakable. Then Audrey saw against the stars the black, daemoniacsilhouette of something anthropoid—the undulant bulk of a gigantic head and shoulders fumblingslowly toward her.

“Y’aaaah! Y’aaaah! Go away! Go away! Go away, snake-devil! Go’way, Yig! I didn’t mean to kill ’em—I was feared he’d be scairt of’em. Don’t, Yig, don’t! I didn’t go for to hurt yore chillen—don’tcome nigh me—don’t change me into no spotted snake!”

But the half-formless head and shoulders only lurched onward toward the bed,very silently.

Everything snapped at once inside Audrey’s head, and in a second she hadturned from a cowering child to a raging madwoman. She knew where the axe was—hung againstthe wall on those pegs near the lantern. It was within easy reach, and she could find it inthe dark. Before she was conscious of anything further it was in her hands, and she was creepingtoward the foot of the bed—toward the monstrous head and shoulders that every moment gropedtheir way nearer. Had there been any light, the look on her face would not have been pleasantto see.

“Take that, you! And that, and that, and that!”

She was laughing shrilly now, and her cackles mounted higher as she saw thatthe starlight beyond the window was yielding to the dim prophetic pallor of coming dawn.

Dr. McNeill wiped the perspiration from his forehead and put on his glassesagain. I waited for him to resume, and as he kept silent I spoke softly.

“She lived? She was found? Was it ever explained?”

The doctor cleared his throat.

“Yes—she lived, in a way. And it was explained. I told you therewas no bewitchment—only cruel, pitiful, material horror.”

It was Sally Compton who had made the discovery. She had ridden over to theDavis cabin the next afternoon to talk over the party with Audrey, and had seen no smoke fromthe chimney. That was queer. It had turned very warm again, yet Audrey was usually cooking somethingat that hour. The mules were making hungry-sounding noises in the barn, and there was no signof old Wolf sunning himself in the accustomed spot by the door.

Altogether, Sally did not like the look of the place, so was very timid andhesitant as she dismounted and knocked. She got no answer but waited some time before tryingthe crude door of split logs. The lock, it appeared, was unfastened; and she slowly pushed herway in. Then, perceiving what was there, she reeled back, gasped, and clung to the jamb to preserveher balance.

A terrible odour had welled out as she opened the door, but that was not whathad stunned her. It was what she had seen. For within that shadowy cabin monstrous things hadhappened and three shocking objects remained on the floor to awe and baffle the beholder.

Near the burned-out fireplace was the great dog—purple decay on the skinleft bare by mange and old age, and the whole carcass burst by the puffing effect of rattlesnakepoison. It must have been bitten by a veritable legion of the reptiles.

To the right of the door was the axe-hacked remnant of what had been a man—cladin a nightshirt, and with the shattered bulk of a lantern clenched in one hand. He was totallyfree from any sign of snake-bite. Near him lay the ensanguined axe, carelessly discarded.

And wriggling flat on the floor was a loathsome, vacant-eyed thing that hadbeen a woman, but was now only a mute mad caricature. All that this thing could do was to hiss,and hiss, and hiss.

Both the doctor and I were brushing cold drops from our foreheads by this time.He poured something from a flask on his desk, took a nip, and handed another glass to me. Icould only suggest tremulously and stupidly:

“So Walker had only fainted that first time—the screams roused him,and the axe did the rest?”

“Yes.” Dr. McNeill’s voice was low. “But he met his deathfrom snakes just the same. It was his fear working in two ways—it made him faint, and itmade him fill his wife with the wild stories that caused her to strike out when she thoughtshe saw the snake-devil.”

I thought for a moment.

“And Audrey—wasn’t it queer how the curse of Yig seemed to workitself out on her? I suppose the impression of hissing snakes had been fairly ground into her.”

“Yes. There were lucid spells at first, but they got to be fewer and fewer.Her hair came white at the roots as it grew, and later began to fall out. The skin grew blotchy,and when she died— “

I interrupted with a start.

“Died? Then what was that—that thing downstairs?”

McNeill spoke gravely.

“That is what was born to her three-quarters of a year afterward.There were three more of them—two were even worse—but this is the only one that lived.”

Part I.

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of theAylesbury 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 theruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, andthe 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 scatteredhouses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowingwhy, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then oncrumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent andfurtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be betterto 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 symmetricalto give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especialclearness 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 crudewooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches ofmarshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwillschatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistentrhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic’s upperreaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hillsamong which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crownedtops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep theirdistance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a smallvillage huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders atthe cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that ofthe neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the housesare deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenlymercantile 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 isalways a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base ofthe hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterwardone sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season ofhorror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by anyordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artistsor summer tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strangeforest 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 thetown’s and the world’s welfare at heart—people shun it without knowing exactlywhy. Perhaps one reason—though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers—is that thenatives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so commonin many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-definedmental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligenceis woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests,and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the twoor three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the generallevel of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only theirnames remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still sendtheir eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the moulderinggambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can sayjust what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclavesof the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great roundedhills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings fromthe ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Churchat 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 Trainof 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 fromunder Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I my self did not more than a Fortnight agocatch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there werea Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth cou’draise 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, printedin 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 stonepillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated pointsat the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil’s HopYard—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 thatthey time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer’s struggling breath. If they cancatch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniaclaughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come downfrom very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old—older by far than any of the communitieswithin thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimneyof the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at thefalls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did notflourish here, and the nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of allare the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hill-tops, but these are more generallyattributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within thesecircles and around the sizeable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular beliefthat 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.

Part II.

It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set against a hillsidefour miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateleywas born at 5 A.M. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled because itwas Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because thenoises 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 thedecadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of thirty-five, living withan aged and half-insane father about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whisperedin his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the regionmade no attempt to disavow the child; concerning the other side of whose ancestry the countryfolk might—and did—speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemedstrangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a contrast to her own sicklyand pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powersand tremendous future.

Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lonecreature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorousbooks which her father had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fastfalling to pieces with age and worm-holes. She had never been to school, but was filled withdisjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her. The remote farmhouse hadalways been feared because of Old Whateley’s reputation for black magic, and the unexplaineddeath by violence of Mrs. Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not helped to makethe place popular. Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandioseday-dreams and singular occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares ina 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 thedogs’ barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor or midwife presided athis coming. Neighbours knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when Old Whateley drove hissleigh through the snow into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of loungersat Osborn’s general store. There seemed to be a change in the old man—an added elementof furtiveness in the clouded brain which subtly transformed him from an object to a subjectof fear—though he was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it allhe shewed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and what he said of the child’spaternity was remembered by many of his hearers years afterward.

“I dun’t keer what folks think—ef Lavinny’s boy lookedlike his pa, he wouldn’t look like nothin’ ye expeck. Ye needn’t think theonly folks is the folks hereabaouts. Lavinny’s read some, an’ has seed some thingsthe 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 Idew, ye wouldn’t ast no better church weddin’ nor her’n. Let me tell ye suthin’— someday yew folks’ll hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’sname on the top o’ Sentinel Hill! “

The only persons who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were oldZechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer’s common-law wife, MamieBishop. Mamie’s visit was frankly one of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justiceto her observations; but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley hadbought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of cattle-buying on the partof 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 camea period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the herd that grazed precariouslyon the steep hillside above the old farmhouse, and they could never find more than ten or twelveanaemic, bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper, perhaps sprung fromthe unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavymortality amongst the Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspectof incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice during the earlier monthscertain callers fancied they could discern similar sores about the throats of the grey, unshavenold man and his slatternly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.

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

It was somewhat after this time—on Hallowe’en—that a greatblaze was seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like stone standsamidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk was started when Silas Bishop—ofthe undecayed Bishops—mentioned having seen the boy running sturdily up that hill aheadof 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 ofhis lantern. They darted almost noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcherseemed to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterward 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. Wilburwas 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 angerand alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and grandfather in this respect was thoughtvery notable until the horror of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.

The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that “Lavinny’sblack brat “ had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His speech wassomewhat 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 orfour might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflectsome elusive element wholly unpossessed by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did notreside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked withhis 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’schinlessness, 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 somethingalmost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinklyhair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother andgrandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic ofOld Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of Yog-Sothothin the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorredthe boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their barkingmenace.

Part III.

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably increasing the size of hisherd. He also cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of his house—a spacious,peaked-roofed affair whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose threeleast-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself and his daughter. Theremust have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable him to accomplish somuch hard labour; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to shewthe effects of sound calculation. It had already begun as soon as Wilbur was born, when oneof the many tool-sheds had been put suddenly in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stoutfresh lock. Now, in restoring the abandoned upper story of the house, he was a no less thoroughcraftsman. His mania shewed itself only in his tight boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimedsection—though many declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamationat all. Less inexplicable was his fitting up of another downstairs room for his new grandson—aroom which several callers saw, though no one was ever admitted to the closely boarded upperstory. 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 hisown 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 menda torn black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, “but the boy’sfitten to make better use of ‘em. He’d orter hev ‘em as well sot 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—hissize and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as large as a child of four, andwas a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker. He ran freely about the fields and hills, andaccompanied his mother on all her wanderings. At home he would pore diligently over the queerpictures and charts in his grandfather’s books, while Old Whateley would instruct andcatechise him through long, hushed afternoons. By this time the restoration of the house wasfinished, and those who watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been made intoa 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. Aboutthe period of this work’s completion people noticed that the old tool-house, tightly lockedand windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur’s birth, had been abandoned again. The doorswung listlessly open, and when Earl Sawyer once stepped within after a cattle-selling callon 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 thehills, and which could not come from anything sane or of this earth. But then, the homes andsheds of Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.

The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone sworeto a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On May-Eve of 1915 there were tremorswhich even the Aylesbury people felt, whilst the following Hallowe’en produced an undergroundrumbling queerly synchronised 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 himselfnow; but talked much less than formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for thefirst 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 thelistener with a sense of unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed toward him by dogs hadnow become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to traversethe countryside in safety. His occasional use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongstthe 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 story. She would never tellwhat her father and the boy were doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed anabnormal degree of fear when a jocose fish-peddler tried the locked door leading to the stairway.That peddler told the store loungers at Dunwich Village that he thought he heard a horse stampingon that floor above. The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of the cattlethat so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they recalled tales of Old Whateley’syouth, and of the strange things that are called out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificedat the proper time to certain heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that dogs hadbegun to hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently as they hated and feared youngWilbur personally.

In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the localdraft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men fit even to be sent to a developmentcamp. The government, alarmed at such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officersand medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England newspaper readersmay still recall. It was the publicity attending this investigation which set reporters on thetrack of the Whateleys, and caused the Boston Globe and Arkham Advertiser to printflamboyant Sunday stories of young Wilbur’s precociousness, Old Whateley’s blackmagic, the shelves of strange books, the sealed second story of the ancient farmhouse, and theweirdness of the whole region and its hill noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and lookedlike a lad of fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his voicehad begun to break.

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

Part IV.

For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into the general life of a morbidcommunity used to their queer ways and hardened to their May-Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twicea year they would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the mountain rumblingswould recur with greater and greater violence; while at all seasons there were strange and portentousdoings at the lonely farmhouse. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds in thesealed upper story even when all the family were downstairs, and they wondered how swiftly orhow lingeringly a cow or bullock was usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to theSociety for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; but nothing ever came of it, since Dunwichfolk 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 beardedface gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great siege of carpentry went on at theold house. It was all inside the sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber peopleconcluded that the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions and even removedthe attic floor, leaving only one vast open void between the ground story and the peaked roof.They had torn down the great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsyoutside tin stovepipe.

In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number of whippoorwillsthat would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regardthe circ*mstance as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn’s thathe 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’sa-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 quietdaown 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 WilburWhateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the darkness and telephoned from Osborn’sin the village. He found Old Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorousbreathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino daughter and oddly bearded grandsonstood by the bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestionof rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The doctor, though, waschiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwillsthat cried their endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps ofthe dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural—too much, thought Dr. Houghton, like the wholeof the region he had entered so reluctantly in response to the urgent call.

Toward one o’clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interruptedhis wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.

“More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows—an’ thatgrows faster. It’ll be ready to sarve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth withthe 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 whippoorwillsoutside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while some indications of the strange hillnoises came from afar off, he added another sentence or two.

“Feed it reg’lar, Willy, an’ mind the quantity; but dun’tlet it grow too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye opens toYog-Sothoth, it’s all over an’ no use. Only them from beyont kin make it multiplyan’ 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 whippoorwillsfollowed 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 imperceptiblyto 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-sidedway, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in distant places where rareand forbidden books of old days are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwichbecause of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door; but wasalways able to silence inquiry through fear or through use of that fund of old-time gold whichstill, 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 MiskatonicUniversity called upon him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and three-quartersfeet tall.

Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother witha 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 burnedon Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the rhythmical screaming of vastflocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlightedWhateley farmhouse. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of pandaemoniac cachinnationwhich filled all the countryside, and not until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then theyvanished, hurrying southward where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no onecould quite be certain till later. None of the country folk seemed to have died—but poorLavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never seen again.

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

Part V.

The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur’s first trip outsidethe Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationalein Paris, the British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of MiskatonicUniversity of Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he desperately wanted; so at lengthhe set out in person, shabby, dirty, bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy atMiskatonic, which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall, and carryinga cheap new valise from Osborn’s general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appearedone day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library—thehideous 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 nothought save to find his way to the university grounds; where, indeed, he passed heedlesslyby the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged franticallyat its stout chain.

Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr. Dee’s Englishversion which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon receiving access to the Latin copyhe at once began to collate the two texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage whichwould have come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could not civillyrefrain 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 politelyplied him with questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or incantationcontaining 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 copiedthe formula he finally chose, Dr. Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at the openpages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats tothe peace and sanity of the world.

“Nor is it to be thought”, ran the text as Armitage mentally translatedit, “that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the commonbulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Onesshall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensionedand to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothothis 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 have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and whyno one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but ofTheir semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begottenon mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truesteidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen andfoul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at theirSeasons. 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 Southand the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven, but who hath seenthe deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhuis Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulnessshall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitationis even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, wherebythe spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rulesnow. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for hereshall They reign again.”

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

“Mr. Armitage”, he said, “I calc’late I’ve gotto take that book home. They’s things in it I’ve got to try under sarten conditionsthat I can’t git here, an’ it ‘ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule holdme up. Let me take it along, Sir, an’ I’ll swar they wun’t nobody know thedifference. I dun’t need to tell ye I’ll take good keer of it. It wa’n’tme that put this Dee copy in the shape it is. . . .”

He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian’s face, and his owngoatish features grew crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell him he might make a copy of whatparts he needed, thought suddenly of the possible consequences and checked himself. There wastoo much responsiblity in giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateleysaw how things stood, and tried to answer lightly.

“Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard wun’tbe 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’sgorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible from the window. He thought of thewild tales he had heard, and recalled the old Sunday stories in the Advertiser; thesethings, and the lore he had picked up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during his one visitthere. Unseen things not of earth—or at least not of tri-dimensional earth—rushedfoetid 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 terriblepart of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance in the black dominion of theancient and once passive nightmare. He locked away the Necronomicon with a shudder ofdisgust, but the room still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. “As a foulnessshall ye know them, “ he quoted. Yes—the odour was the same as that which had sickenedhim at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish andominous, once again, and laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.

“Inbreeding?” Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. “GreatGod, what simpletons! Shew them Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan and they’ll thinkit a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing—what cursed shapeless influence on or offthis three-dimensioned earth—was Wilbur Whateley’s father? Born on Candlemas—ninemonths 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 worldin half-human flesh and blood?”

During the ensuing weeks Dr. Armitage set about to collect all possible dataon 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 toponder over in the grandfather’s last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to DunwichVillage 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 tothe nature, methods, and desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talkswith several students of archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many others elsewhere, gavehim a growing amazement which passed slowly through varied degrees of alarm to a state of reallyacute spiritual fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly that something ought to be done aboutthe lurking terrors of the upper Miskatonic valley, and about the monstrous being known to thehuman world as Wilbur Whateley.

Part VI.

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

Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small hoursof the 3d Dr. Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild, fierce cries of the savage watchdogon 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 screamfrom a wholly different throat—such a scream as roused half the sleepers of Arkham andhaunted their dreams ever afterward—such a scream as could come from no being born ofearth, or wholly of earth.

Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street and lawnto the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarmstill shrilling from the library. An open window shewed black and gaping in the moonlight. Whathad come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming, now fast fadinginto a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warnedArmitage that what was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushedback the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw ProfessorWarren 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 witha sudden start that a loud chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnablyrhythmical 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 lowwhining came. For a second nobody dared to turn on the light, then Armitage summoned up hiscourage and snapped the switch. One of the three—it is not certain which—shriekedaloud at what sprawled before them among disordered tables and overturned chairs. ProfessorRice declares that he wholly lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not stumble orfall.

The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellowichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothingand some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while itschest 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 insidethe window an empty canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central deska revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later explaining why it had not beenfired. The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the time. It would be triteand not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly saythat it could not be vividly visualised by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are tooclosely 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 man-like hands and head, and the goatish, chinlessface had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body wereteratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walkon earth unchallenged or uneradicated.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog’srending 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 certainsnakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off andsheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomena score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. Their arrangementwas odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or thesolar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemedto be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler withpurple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. Thelimbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’sgiant saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. Whenthe thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatorycause normal to the non-human side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable asa deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearancewhich alternated with a sickly greyish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuineblood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the paintedfloor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discolouration behind it.

As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it beganto 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 allcorrelation with any speech of earth, but toward the last there came some disjointed fragmentsevidently taken from the Necronomicon, that monstrous blasphemy in quest of which thething 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 crescendoes ofunholy anticipation.

Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long, lugubrioushowl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate thing, and the great blackeyes fell in appallingly. Outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenlyceased, and above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a panic-struckwhirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced fromsight, frantic at that which they had sought for prey.

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

Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need not describethe kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred before the eyesof Dr. Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is permissible to say that, aside from the externalappearance of face and hands, the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been verysmall. 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 bonyskeleton; at least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his unknown father.

Part VII.

Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror. Formalities were gone throughby bewildered officials, abnormal details were duly kept from press and public, and men weresent to Dunwich and Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs of the lateWilbur Whateley. They found the countryside in great agitation, both because of the growingrumblings beneath the domed hills, and because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lappingsounds which came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by Whateley’s boarded-upfarmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and cattle during Wilbur’s absence, had developeda woefully acute case of nerves. The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boardedplace; and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased’s living quarters, the newlymended sheds, to a single visit. They filed a ponderous report at the court-house in Aylesbury,and litigations concerning heirship are said to be still in progress amongst the innumerableWhateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper Miskatonic valley.

An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a hugeledger 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’sdesk. After a week of debate it was sent to Miskatonic University, together with the deceased’scollection of strange books, for study and possible translation; but even the best linguistssoon saw that it was not likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold withwhich Wilbur and Old Whateley always paid their debts has yet been discovered.

It was in the dark of September 9th that the horror broke loose. The hill noiseshad been very pronounced during the evening, and dogs barked frantically all night. Early riserson the 10th noticed a peculiar stench in the air. About seven o’clock Luther Brown, thehired boy at George Corey’s, between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed frenziedlyback from his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows. He was almost convulsed with frightas he stumbled into the kitchen; and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawingand lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared with him. Betweengasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs. Corey.

“Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis’ Corey—they’ssuthin’ ben thar! It smells like thunder, an’ all the bushes an’ little treesis pushed back from the rud like they’d a haouse ben moved along of it. An’ thatain’t the wust, nuther. They’s prints in the rud, Mis’ Corey—greatraound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk daown 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 Irun, an’ I see every one was covered with lines spreadin’ aout from one place, likeas if big palm-leaf fans—twict or three times as big as any they is—hed of ben paoundeddaown into the rud. An’ the smell was awful, like what it is araound Wizard Whateley’sol’ haouse. . . . “

Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had senthim 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 gotSally Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop’s, the nearest place to Whateley’s, itbecame her turn to listen instead of transmit; for Sally’s boy Chauncey, who slept poorly,had been up on the hill toward Whateley’s, and had dashed back in terror after one lookat 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 overthe party wire, “Cha’ncey he just come back a-postin’, and couldn’thaff talk fer bein’ scairt! He says Ol’ Whateley’s haouse is all blowed up,with the timbers scattered raound like they’d ben dynamite inside; only the bottom floorain’t through, but is all covered with a kind o’ tar-like stuff that smells awfulan’ drips daown offen the aidges onto the graoun’ whar the side timbers is blownaway. An’ they’s awful kinder marks in the yard, tew—great raound marks biggerraound than a hogshead, an’ all sticky with stuff like is on the blowed-up haouse. Cha’nceyhe 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 lookfer Seth’s caows, frighted ez he was; an’ faound ‘em in the upper pasturenigh 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 ’emlike they’s ben on Whateley’s cattle ever senct Lavinny’s black brat was born.Seth he’s gone aout naow to look at ’em, though I’ll vaow he wun’t keerter git very nigh Wizard Whateley’s! Cha’ncey didn’t look keerful ter seewhar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the pasturage, but he says he thinks it p’intedtowards the glen rud to the village.”

“I tell ye, Mis’ Corey, they’s suthin’ abroad as hadn’torter be abroad, an’ I for one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to the bad eendhe desarved, 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 benunseen things araound Dunwich—livin’ things—as ain’t human an’ain’t good fer human folks.”

“The graoun’ was a-talkin’ lass night, an’ towardsmornin’ Cha’ncey he heerd the whippoorwills so laoud in Col’ Spring Glen hecouldn’t sleep nun. Then he thought he heerd another faint-like saound over towards WizardWhateley’s—a kinder rippin’ or tearin’ o’ wood, like some bigbox er crate was bein’ opened fur off. What with this an’ that, he didn’tgit to sleep at all till sunup, an’ no sooner was he up this mornin’, but he’sgot to go over to Whateley’s an’ see what’s the matter. He see enough, I tellye, Mis’ Corey! This dun’t mean no good, an’ I think as all the men-folksought 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. Theywould 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 daown thar ef ye stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an’ Bear’sDen.”

By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were troopingover the roads and meadows between the new-made Whateley ruins and Cold Spring Glen, examiningin horror the vast, monstrous prints, the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck ofthe farmhouse, and the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and roadsides. Whatever hadburst loose upon the world had assuredly gone down into the great sinister ravine; for all thetrees on the banks were bent and broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the precipice-hangingunderbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an avalanche, had slid down through the tangledgrowths of the almost vertical slope. From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinablefoetor; 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 werewith 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 towild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a humorous paragraph about it; an item soonafterward reproduced by the Associated Press.

That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded as stoutlyas possible. Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to remain in open pasturage. About twoin the morning a frightful stench and the savage barking of the dogs awakened the householdat Elmer Frye’s, on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and all agreed that they couldhear a sort of muffled swishing or lapping sound from somewhere outside. Mrs. Frye proposedtelephoning the neighbours, and Elmer was about to agree when the noise of splintering woodburst in upon their deliberations. It came, apparently, from the barn; and was quickly followedby a hideous screaming and stamping amongst the cattle. The dogs slavered and crouched closeto the feet of the fear-numbed family. Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but knew itwould be death to go out into that black farmyard. The children and the womenfolk whimpered,kept from screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct of defence which told them their livesdepended on silence. At last the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful moaning, and a greatsnapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes, huddled together in the sitting-room, didnot dare to move until the last echoes died away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidstthe dismal moans from the stable and the daemoniac piping of late whippoorwills in the glen,Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of the second phase ofthe horror.

The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed, uncommunicativegroups came and went where the fiendish thing had occurred. Two titan swaths of destructionstretched 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 couldbe found and identified. Some of these were in curious fragments, and all that survived hadto be shot. Earl Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but others maintainedit would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a branch that hovered about half way betweensoundness and decadence, made darkly wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practicedon the hill-tops. He came of a line where tradition ran strong, and his memories of chantingsin the great stone circles were not altogether connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.

Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organise for realdefence. In a few cases closely related families would band together and watch in the gloomunder 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 thatthe new horror had gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed anoffensive expedition down in the glen, though they did not venture to set an actual exampleto the still reluctant majority.

When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was less huddlingtogether of families. In the morning both the Frye and the Seth Bishop households reported excitementamong the dogs and vague sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horrora fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill. As before, the sidesof the road shewed 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 themoving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along the same path. At thebase of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed shrubbery saplings led steeply upward, and theseekers gasped when they saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the inexorabletrail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete verticality;and as the investigators climbed around to the hill’s summit by safer routes they sawthat the trail ended—or rather, reversed—there.

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

Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The whippoorwillsin the glen had screamed with such unusual persistence that many could not sleep, and about3 A.M. all the party telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers hearda fright-mad voice shriek out, “Help, oh, my Gawd! . . .” and some thoughta crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation. There was nothing more. No onedared do anything, and no one knew till morning whence the call came. Then those who had heardit called everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes did not reply. The truth appearedan hour later, when a hastily assembled group of armed men trudged out to the Frye place atthe head of the glen. It was horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and monstrousprints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an egg-shell, and amongst theruins nothing living or dead could be discovered. Only a stench and a tarry stickiness. TheElmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich.

Part VIII.

In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of the horror had been blacklyunwinding itself behind the closed door of a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious manuscriptrecord or diary of Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation, hadcaused much worry and bafflement among the experts in languages both ancient and modern; itsvery 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 wasthat the text represented an artificial alphabet, giving the effect of a cipher; though noneof the usual methods of cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when appliedon the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used. The ancient books takenfrom Whateley’s quarters, while absorbingly interesting and in several cases promisingto open up new and terrible lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were ofno assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with an iron clasp, was inanother unknown alphabet—this one of a very different cast, and resembling Sanscrit morethan 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 linguisticlearning and skill in the mystical formulae of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically usedby certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times, and which have inherited manyforms and traditions from the wizards of the Saracenic world. That question, however, he didnot 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 greatamount of text involved, the writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using anotherspeech than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulae and incantations. Accordinglyhe 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 riddlewas a deep and complex one; and that no simple mode of solution could merit even a trial. Allthrough late August he fortified himself with the massed lore of cryptography; drawing uponthe fullest resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the arcana ofTrithemius’ Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta’s De Furtivis Literarum Notis,De Vigenère’s Traité des Chiffres, Falconer’s CryptomenysisPatefacta, Davys’ and Thicknesse’s eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairlymodern authorities as Blair, von Marten, and Klüber’s Kryptographik. He interspersedhis study of the books with attacks on the manuscript itself, and in time became convinced thathe had to deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of cryptograms, in which many separatelists of corresponding letters are arranged like the multiplication table, and the message builtup with arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities seemed rathermore helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded that the code of the manuscript wasone 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 partsof the manuscript, emerged definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the textwas indeed in English.

On the evening of September 2nd the last major barrier gave way, and Dr. Armitageread for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur Whateley’s annals. It was in trutha diary, as all had thought; and it was couched in a style clearly shewing the mixed occulterudition and general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first long passagethat 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 twelveor thirteen.

“Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth” it ran, “whichdid not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs more aheadof me than I had thought it would be, and is not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins’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 the2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can’tbreak through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbatthat it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be deadthen, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between theYr 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 Voorishsign 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 thereare no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured, therebeing much of outside to work on.”

Morning found Dr. Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakefulconcentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table under the electriclight 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 breakfastfrom the house he could scarcely dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and thenhalted maddeningly as a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinnerwere brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either. Toward the middle of thenext night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost ashideous as the truths and menaces to man’s existence that he had uncovered.

On the morning of September 4th Professor Rice and Dr. Morgan insisted on seeinghim for a while, and departed trembling and ashen-grey. That evening he went to bed, but sleptonly fitfully. Wednesday—the next day—he was back at the manuscript, and began totake 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 an easy-chair in his office, but was atthe manuscript again before dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr. Hartwell, calledto see him and insisted that he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was of the most vitalimportance for him to complete the reading of the diary, and promising an explanation in duecourse of time.

That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal and sankback exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a half-comatose state; but he wasconscious enough to warn her off with a sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the noteshe had taken. Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all in a greatenvelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat pocket. He had sufficient strengthto 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, inGod’s name, can we do?”

Dr. Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no explanationsto Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative need of a long conference withRice and Morgan. His wilder wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appealsthat something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some planfor the extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earthby some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the worldwas in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away from the solar systemand 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 Necronomiconand the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding some formulato check the peril he conjured up.

“Stop them, stop them! “ he would shout. “Those Whateleysmeant to let them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do something—it’sa blind business, but I know how to make the powder. . . . It hasn’t beenfed 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 sleptoff his disorder that night without developing any real fever. He woke late Friday, clear ofhead, though sober with a gnawing fear and tremendous sense of responsibility. Saturday afternoonhe felt able to go over to the library and summon Rice and Morgan for a conference, and therest of that day and evening the three men tortured their brains in the wildest speculationand the most desperate debate. Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stackshelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae were copied with feverishhaste and in bewildering abundance. Of scepticism there was none. All three had seen the bodyof Wilbur Whateley as it lay on the floor in a room of that very building, and after that notone 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 thenegative finally won. There were things involved which simply could not be believed by thosewho 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 daySunday 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 ofany material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur Whateley had left behind him—theearth-threatening entity which, unknown to him, was to burst forth in a few hours and becomethe memorable Dunwich horror.

Monday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr. Armitage, for the task in hand requiredan infinity of research and experiment. Further consultations of the monstrous diary broughtabout various changes of plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertaintymust remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out, and believed he would trya trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurelyaway in a corner of the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the AssociatedPress, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whiskey 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 wouldbe meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no other way to annul the deeper andmore malign meddling which others had done before him.

Part IX.

Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich, arriving at the villageabout one in the afternoon. The day was pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kindof quiet dread and portent seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowyravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some mountain-top a gaunt circle of stones couldbe glimpsed against the sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn’s store they knewsomething hideous had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the Elmer Frye houseand family. Throughout that afternoon they rode around Dunwich; questioning the natives concerningall that had occurred, and seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Fryeruins with their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks in the Fryeyard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous swaths of disturbed vegetation in variousplaces. 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 comefrom 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, theyfound 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 Fryeyard. The natives, all of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed asArmitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something and turned pale, nudgingFred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep hollow that yawned close by.

“Gawd”, he gasped, “I telled ‘em not ter go daown intothe glen, an’ I never thought nobody’d dew it with them tracks an’ that smellan’ the whippoorwills a-screechin’ daown thar in the dark o’ noonday. . . . “

A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear seemedstrained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening. Armitage, now that he had actuallycome upon the horror and its monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to behis. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous blasphemy lumbered upon itseldritch course. Negotium perambulans in tenebris. . . . The old librarianrehearsed the formulae he had memorised, and clutched the paper containing the alternative onehe had not memorised. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order. Rice, besidehim, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating insects; whilst Morganuncased the big-game rifle on which he relied despite his colleague’s warnings that nomaterial weapon would be of help.

Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind of amanifestation to expect; but he did not add to the fright of the Dunwich people by giving anyhints or clues. He hoped that it might be conquered without any revelation to the world of themonstrous 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 boltswere useless before a force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shooktheir heads at the visitors’ plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near the glen; andas they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the watchers again.

There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills pipedthreateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold Spring Glen, would bring a touchof ineffable foetor to the heavy night air; such a foetor as all three of the watchers had smelledonce before, when they stood above a dying thing that had passed for fifteen years and a halfas a human being. But the looked-for terror did not appear. Whatever was down there in the glenwas biding its time, and Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to attackit 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 themselvesup beyond the hills to the northwest. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seekingshelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed Frye outbuildings, theydebated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the aggressive and going down into the glen in questof their nameless, monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of thundersounded 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 hopedthat 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 confusedbabel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought to view a frightened group ofmore than a dozen men, running, shouting, and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the leadbegan sobbing out words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed a coherentform.

“Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd”, the voice choked out. “It’sa-goin’ agin, an’ this time by day! It’s aout—it’s aoutan’ a-movin’ this very minute, an’ only the Lord knows when it’ll beon us all!”

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

“Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heerd the ‘phone a-ringin’,an’ it was Mis’ Corey, George’s wife, that lives daown by the junction. Shesays 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 sideter this—an’ smelt the same awful smell like he smelt when he faound the big trackslas’ 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 ona suddent the trees along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an’ they was a awfulstompin’ an’ splashin’ in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn’t seenothin’ at all, only just the bendin’ trees an’ underbrush.

“Then fur ahead where Bishop’s Brook goes under the rud he heerda awful creakin’ an’ strainin’ on the bridge, an’ says he could tellthe saound o’ wood a-startin’ to crack an’ split. An’ all the whileshe 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’ SentinelHill—Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he’d heerd it furst an’ lookat the graound. It was all mud an’ water, an’ the sky was dark, an’ the rainwas wipin’ aout all tracks abaout as fast as could be; but beginnin’ at the glenmaouth, whar the trees had moved, they was still some o’ them awful prints big as bar’lslike he seen Monday. “

At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.

“But that ain’t the trouble naow—that was only thestart. Zeb here was callin’ folks up an’ everybody was a-listenin’ in whena call from Seth Bishop’s cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin’ on fit terkill—she’d jest seed the trees a-bendin’ beside the rud, an’ says theywas 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 boyCha’ncey was a-screamin’ as haow it was jest like what he smelt up to the Whateleyrewins Monday mornin’. An’ the dogs was all barkin’ an’ whinin’awful.

“An’ then she let aout a turrible yell, an’ says the sheddaown the rud had jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind wa’n’tstrong 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 agin, an’ says the frontyard picket fence hed just crumbled up, though they wa’n’t no sign o’ whatdone it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha’ncey an’ ol’ Seth Bishopa-yellin’ tew, an’ Sally was shriekin’ aout that suthin’ heavy hed struckthe haouse—not lightnin’ nor nothin’, but suthin’ heavy agin 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, hadbarely 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 couldhear a turrible crashin’, an’ a hull flock o’ screamin’ . . .jest 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 ‘phonearter that. Jest still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an’ wagons an’ raoundedup as many able-bodied menfolks as we could git, at Corey’s place, an’ come up hereter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I think it’s the Lord’s jedgmentfer our iniquities, that no mortal kin ever set aside.”

Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke decisivelyto 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 thoseWhateleys were wizards—well, this thing is a thing of wizardry, and must be put down bythe same means. I’ve seen Wilbur Whateley’s diary and read some of the strange oldbooks he used to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite to make the thingfade away. Of course, one can’t be sure, but we can always take a chance. It’s invisible—Iknew it would be—but there’s a powder in this long-distance sprayer that might makeit shew 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’llnever know what the world has escaped. Now we’ve only this one thing to fight, and itcan’t multiply. It can, though, do a lot of harm; so we mustn’t hesitate to ridthe community of it.”

“We must follow it—and the way to begin is to go to the place thathas 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, pointingwith a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.

“I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop’s quickest by cuttin’acrost the lower medder here, wadin’ the brook at the low place, an’ climbin’through Carrier’s mowin’ and the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on the upperrud 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 thatthe storm had worn itself away. When Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osbornwarned him and walked ahead to shew the right one. Courage and confidence were mounting; thoughthe twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill which lay toward the end of their shortcut, and among whose fantastic ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put thesequalities to a severe test.

At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out. They werea little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and hideously unmistakable tracks shewedwhat had passed by. Only a few moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just around thebend. It was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was found in eitherof the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house and barn. No one cared to remain thereamidst the stench and tarry stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horribleprints leading on toward the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned slopes of SentinelHill.

As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley’s abode they shudderedvisibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no joke tracking down somethingas 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 andmatting visible along the broad swath marking the monster’s former route to and from thesummit.

Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned thesteep 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 indicatinga certain spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users of opticaldevices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focussed 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’sa-goin’ up—slow-like—creepin’ up ter the top this minute, heaven onlyknows what fur!”

Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thingto chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right—butsuppose 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 tophases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden, and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.

Part X.

In the end the three men from Arkham—old, white-bearded Dr. Armitage, stocky, iron-greyProfessor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr. Morgan—ascended the mountain alone. After muchpatient instruction regarding its focussing and use, they left the telescope with the frightenedgroup that remained in the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by those amongwhom the glass was passed around. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more thanonce. High above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker re-passed withsnail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the pursuers were gaining.

Curtis Whateley—of the undecayed branch—was holding the telescopewhen the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the crowd that the men wereevidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerablyahead of where the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the partywere seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the invisible blasphemy had passedit.

Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was adjustingthe sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily,recalling that this sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Twoor three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope and strained hisvision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the party’s point of vantage above and behindthe 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—acloud about the size of a moderately large building—near the top of the mountain. Curtis,who had held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of theroad. He reeled, and would have crumpled to the ground had not two or three others seized andsteadied 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 rescuethe fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolatedreplies 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’nanything, with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads 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 stovepipes,an’ all a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’ . . .all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings . . . an’ Gawd in heaven—thathaff face on top! . . . “

This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis; and hecollapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and Will Hutchins carried him to theroadside and laid him on the damp grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescopeon the mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible three tiny figures,apparently running toward the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these—nothingmore. Then everyone noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and evenin the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills, andin 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 standingon the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable distance fromit. One figure, he said, seemed to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals;and as Sawyer mentioned the circ*mstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical soundfrom the distance, as if a loud chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette onthat remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, butno 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 werepiping wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the visibleritual.

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

The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd gazed aboutthe horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing more than a spectral deepening ofthe 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 shewed a certain mistinessaround the altar-stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescopeat that instant. The whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwichbraced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with which the atmosphere seemedsurcharged.

Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will neverleave 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 theycame 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-basstimbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one mustdo 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—yetdid they come from no visible being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural sourcein the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain’s base huddled stillcloser, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.

“Ygnaiih . . . 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 strugglewere going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquelysilhouetted human figures on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures astheir incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling,from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, werethose half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather renewed forceand coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy.

“Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah—e’yayayayaaaa . . . ngh’aaaaa . . . ngh’aaaa . . . 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 indisputablyEnglish syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the frantic vacancybeside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumpedviolently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmicpeal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning-boltshot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force andindescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees, grass, and underbrushwere whipped into a fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain’s base, weakened bythe lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet. Dogshowled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, andover field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.

The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To thisday 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 themountain 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 reducedthe group of natives to a state of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they onlyshook their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.

“The thing has gone forever, “ Armitage said. “It has beensplit up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibilityin a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was likeits father—and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outsideour material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemycould ever have called him for a moment on the hills. “

There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor CurtisWhateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to his headwith a moan. Memory seemed to pick itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sightthat 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’sface 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 bewildermentnot quite crystallised into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who wanderingly rememberedancient things but who had been silent heretofore, spoke aloud.

“Fifteen year’ gone,” he rambled, “I heerd 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’tbelong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by otherlaws 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 WilburWhateley himself—enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to make hispassing out a pretty terrible sight. I’m going to burn his accursed diary, and if youmen are wise you’ll dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings ofstanding stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings those Whateleyswere so fond of—the beings they were going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human raceand drag the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose.”

“But as to this thing we’ve just sent back—the Whateleysraised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big from thesame reason that Wilbur grew fast and big—but it beat him because it had a greater shareof 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 fatherthan he did.”

I.

Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mentalshock was the cause of what I inferred—that last straw which sent me racing out of thelonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motorat night—is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deepextent to which I shared the information and speculations of Henry Akeley, the things I sawand heard, and the admitted vividness of the impression produced on me by these things, I cannotprove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all, Akeley’sdisappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-markson the outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble inthe hills and failed to return. There was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or thatthose horrible cylinders and machines had been stored in the study. That he had mortally fearedthe 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 unprecedentedVermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at MiskatonicUniversity in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore.Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organised reliefwhich filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in someof the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions and appealedto me to shed what light I could on the subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore studytaken so seriously, and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearlyan outgrowth of old rustic superstitions. It amused me to find several persons of educationwho insisted that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumours.

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 hismother 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 WinooskiRiver near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane,and a third centring in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course manyof the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down tothese three. In each case country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbingobjects in the surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was awidespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whisperedlegend which old people resurrected for the occasion.

What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they hadever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the streams in thattragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were nothuman, 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 fivefeet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings andseveral sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudesof very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be. It was really remarkable how closelythe reports from different sources tended to coincide; though the wonder was lessened by thefact that the old legends, shared at one time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidlyvivid 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—hadglimpsed 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 fantasticattributes.

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

There were queer footprints or claw-prints in the mud of brook-margins andbarren patches, and curious circles of stones, with the grass around them worn away, which didnot seem to have been placed or entirely shaped by Nature. There were, too, certain caves ofproblematical depth in the sides of the hills; with mouths closed by boulders in a manner scarcelyaccidental, and with more than an average quota of the queer prints leading both toward andaway from them—if indeed the direction of these prints could be justly estimated. Andworst of all, there were the things which adventurous people had seen very rarely in the twilightof 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 thingshad not agreed so well. As it was, nearly all the rumours had several points in common; averringthat the creatures were a sort of huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with twogreat bat-like wings in the middle of the back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, andsometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminatenature. On one occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wadingalong a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Oncea specimen was seen flying—launching itself from the top of a bald, lonely hill at nightand vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant againstthe full moon.

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

But while according to the earliest legends the creatures would appear to haveharmed only those trespassing on their privacy; there were later accounts of their curiosityrespecting men, and of their attempts to establish secret outposts in the human world. Therewere tales of the queer claw-prints seen around farmhouse windows in the morning, and of occasionaldisappearances in regions outside the obviously haunted areas. Tales, besides, of buzzing voicesin imitation of human speech which made surprising offers to lone travellers on roads and cart-pathsin the deep woods, and of children frightened out of their wits by things seen or heard wherethe primal forest pressed close upon their dooryards. In the final layer of legends—thelayer just preceding the decline of superstition and the abandonment of close contact with thedreaded places—there are shocked references to hermits and remote farmers who at someperiod of life appeared to have undergone a repellent mental change, and who were shunned andwhispered about as mortals who had sold themselves to the strange beings. In one of the northeasterncounties it seemed to be a fashion about 1800 to accuse eccentric and unpopular recluses ofbeing allies or representatives of the abhorred things.

As to what the things were—explanations naturally varied. The commonname applied to them was “those ones”, or “the old ones”, though otherterms had a local and transient use. Perhaps the bulk of the Puritan settlers set them downbluntly as familiars of the devil, and made them a basis of awed theological speculation. Thosewith 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—linkedthem 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. Butthe 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 agreedthat the creatures were not native to this earth.

The Pennacook myths, which were the most consistent and picturesque, taughtthat the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear in the sky, and had mines in our earthly hillswhence 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 theirown stars in the north. They harmed only those earth-people who got too near them or spied uponthem. Animals shunned them through instinctive hatred, not because of being hunted. They couldnot eat the things and animals of earth, but brought their own food from the stars. It was badto get near them, and sometimes young hunters who went into their hills never came back. Itwas not good, either, to listen to what they whispered at night in the forest with voices likea bee’s that tried to be like the voices of men. They knew the speech of all kinds ofmen—Pennacooks, Hurons, men of the Five Nations—but did not seem to have or needany speech of their own. They talked with their heads, which changed colour in different waysto mean different things.

All the legendry, of course, white and Indian alike, died down during the nineteenthcentury, 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 thatthere had been any fears or avoidances. Most people simply knew that certain hilly regions wereconsidered as highly unhealthy, unprofitable, and generally unlucky to live in, and that thefarther one kept from them the better off one usually was. In time the ruts of custom and economicinterest became so deeply cut in approved places that there was no longer any reason for goingoutside them, and the haunted hills were left deserted by accident rather than by design. Saveduring infrequent local scares, only wonder-loving grandmothers and retrospective nonagenariansever whispered of beings dwelling in those hills; and even such whisperers admitted that therewas not much to fear from those things now that they were used to the presence of houses andsettlements, and now that human beings let their chosen territory severely alone.

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

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

The more I laughed at such theories, the more these stubborn friends asseveratedthem; 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 fanaticalextremists went so far as to hint at possible meanings in the ancient Indian tales which gavethe hidden beings a non-terrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort withtheir claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer space have often visited earth. Mostof my foes, however, were merely romanticists who insisted on trying to transfer to real lifethe fantastic lore of lurking “little people” made popular by the magnificent horror-fictionof Arthur Machen.

II.

As was only natural under the circ*mstances, this piquant debating finallygot into print in the form of letters to the Arkham Advertiser; some of which were copiedin the press of those Vermont regions whence the flood-stories came. The Rutland Heraldgave half a page of extracts from the letters on both sides, while the Brattleboro Reformerreprinted one of my long historical and mythological summaries in full, with some accompanyingcomments in “The Pendrifter’s” thoughtful column which supported and applaudedmy sceptical 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 lettersfrom Henry Akeley which impressed me so profoundly, and which took me for the first and lasttime to that fascinating realm of crowded green precipices and muttering forest streams.

Most of what I now know of Henry Wentworth Akeley was gathered by correspondencewith his neighbours, and with his only son in California, after my experience in his lonelyfarmhouse. He was, I discovered, the last representative on his home soil of a long, locallydistinguished 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 hadbeen a notable student of mathematics, astronomy, biology, anthropology, and folklore at theUniversity of Vermont. I had never previously heard of him, and he did not give many autobiographicaldetails 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 oncetaking Akeley more seriously than I had taken any of the other challengers of my views. Forone thing, he was really close to the actual phenomena—visible and tangible—thathe speculated so grotesquely about; and for another thing, he was amazingly willing to leavehis conclusions in a tentative state like a true man of science. He had no personal preferencesto advance, and was always guided by what he took to be solid evidence. Of course I began byconsidering him mistaken, but gave him credit for being intelligently mistaken; and at no timedid I emulate some of his friends in attributing his ideas, and his fear of the lonely greenhills, to insanity. I could see that there was a great deal to the man, and knew that what hereported must surely come from strange circ*mstances deserving investigation, however littleit might have to do with the fantastic causes he assigned. Later on I received from him certainmaterial 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 longletter in which Akeley introduced himself, and which formed such an important landmark in myown intellectual history. It is no longer in my possession, but my memory holds almost everyword of its portentous message; and again I affirm my confidence in the sanity of the man whowrote it. Here is the text—a text which reached me in the cramped, archaic-looking scrawlof one who had obviously not mingled much with the world during his sedate, scholarly life.

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

That he had really overheard disturbing voices in the hills, and had reallyfound the black stone he spoke about, was wholly possible despite the crazy inferences he hadmade—inferences probably suggested by the man who had claimed to be a spy of the outerbeings and had later killed himself. It was easy to deduce that this man must have been whollyinsane, but that he probably had a streak of perverse outward logic which made the naive Akeley—alreadyprepared for such things by his folklore studies—believe his tale. As for the latest developments—itappeared from his inability to keep hired help that Akeley’s humbler rustic neighbourswere as convinced as he that his house was besieged by uncanny things at night. The dogs reallybarked, too.

And then the matter of that phonograph record, which I could not but believehe had obtained in the way he said. It must mean something; whether animal noises deceptivelylike human speech, or the speech of some hidden, night-haunting human being decayed to a statenot much above that of lower animals. From this my thoughts went back to the black hieroglyphedstone, and to speculations upon what it might mean. Then, too, what of the photographs whichAkeley 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 credulousopponents might have more on their side than I had conceded. After all, there might be somequeer and perhaps hereditarily misshapen outcasts in those shunned hills, even though no suchrace of star-born monsters as folklore claimed. And if there were, then the presence of strangebodies in the flooded streams would not be wholly beyond belief. Was it too presumptuous tosuppose 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 bizarrerieas Henry Akeley’s wild letter had brought them up.

In the end I answered Akeley’s letter, adopting a tone of friendly interestand soliciting further particulars. His reply came almost by return mail; and contained, trueto 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 frightand nearness to forbidden things; for in spite of the vagueness of most of them, they had adamnably suggestive power which was intensified by the fact of their being genuine photographs—actualoptical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an impersonal transmitting processwithout prejudice, fallibility, or mendacity.

The more I looked at them, the more I saw that my serious estimate of Akeleyand his story had not been unjustified. Certainly, these pictures carried conclusive evidenceof something in the Vermont hills which was at least vastly outside the radius of our commonknowledge and belief. The worst thing of all was the footprint—a view taken where thesun 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 grass-blades in the field of visiongave a clear index of scale and left no possibility of a tricky double exposure. I have calledthe thing a “footprint”, but “claw-print” would be a better term. Evennow I can scarcely describe it save to say that it was hideously crab-like, and that there seemedto be some ambiguity about its direction. It was not a very deep or fresh print, but seemedto be about the size of an average man’s foot. From a central pad, pairs of saw-toothednippers projected in opposite directions—quite baffling as to function, if indeed thewhole object were exclusively an organ of locomotion.

Another photograph—evidently a time-exposure taken in deep shadow—wasof 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 likethe one in the other view. A third picture shewed a druid-like circle of standing stones onthe summit of a wild hill. Around the cryptic circle the grass was very much beaten down andworn away, though I could not detect any footprints even with the glass. The extreme remotenessof the place was apparent from the veritable sea of tenantless mountains which formed the backgroundand stretched away toward a misty horizon.

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

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

From the pictures I turned to the bulky, closely written letter itself; andfor the next three hours was immersed in a gulf of unutterable horror. Where Akeley had givenonly outlines before, he now entered into minute details; presenting long transcripts of wordsoverheard in the woods at night, long accounts of monstrous pinkish forms spied in thicketsat twilight on the hills, and a terrible cosmic narrative derived from the application of profoundand varied scholarship to the endless bygone discourses of the mad self-styled spy who had killedhimself. I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideousof connexions—Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, 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 inconceivabledimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomiconhad only guessed in the vaguest way. I was told of the pits of primal life, and of the streamsthat had trickled down therefrom; and finally, of the tiny rivulet from one of those streamswhich 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 evidencewas damnably vast and overwhelming; and the cool, scientific attitude of Akeley—an attituderemoved as far as imaginable from the demented, the fanatical, the hysterical, or even the extravagantlyspeculative—had a tremendous effect on my thought and judgment. By the time I laid thefrightful letter aside I could understand the fears he had come to entertain, and was readyto do anything in my power to keep people away from those wild, haunted hills. Even now, whentime 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 intowords on paper. I am almost glad that the letter and record and photographs are gone now—andI wish, for reasons I shall soon make clear, that the new planet beyond Neptune had not beendiscovered.

With the reading of that letter my public debating about the Vermont horrorpermanently ended. Arguments from opponents remained unanswered or put off with promises, andeventually the controversy petered out into oblivion. During late May and June I was in constantcorrespondence with Akeley; though once in a while a letter would be lost, so that we wouldhave to retrace our ground and perform considerable laborious copying. What we were trying todo, as a whole, was to compare notes in matters of obscure mythological scholarship and arriveat 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 hellishHimalayan Mi-Go were one and the same order of incarnated nightmare. There were alsoabsorbing zoölogical conjectures, which I would have referred to Professor Dexter in myown 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 warningabout those farther Vermont hills—and about those Himalayan peaks which bold explorersare more and more determined to ascend—is more conducive to public safety than silencewould be. One specific thing we were leading up to was a deciphering of the hieroglyphics onthat infamous black stone—a deciphering which might well place us in possession of secretsdeeper 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 begunto feel an increased sense of espionage, aggravated by the loss of some of our letters; andsaid much about the insidious deeds of certain men whom he considered tools and agents of thehidden beings. Most of all he suspected the surly farmer Walter Brown, who lived alone on arun-down hillside place near the deep woods, and who was often seen loafing around corners inBrattleboro, Bellows Falls, Newfane, and South Londonderry in the most inexplicable and seeminglyunmotivated way. Brown’s voice, he felt convinced, was one of those he had overheard ona certain occasion in a very terrible conversation; and he had once found a footprint or claw-printnear Brown’s house which might possess the most ominous significance. It had been curiouslynear some of Brown’s own footprints—footprints that faced toward it.

So the record was shipped from Brattleboro, whither Akeley drove in his Fordcar along the lonely Vermont back roads. He confessed in an accompanying note that he was beginningto be afraid of those roads, and that he would not even go into Townshend for supplies now exceptin broad daylight. It did not pay, he repeated again and again, to know too much unless onewere very remote from those silent and problematical hills. He would be going to Californiapretty soon to live with his son, though it was hard to leave a place where all one’smemories and ancestral feelings centred.

Before trying the record on the commercial machine which I borrowed from thecollege administration building I carefully went over all the explanatory matter in Akeley’svarious letters. This record, he had said, was obtained about 1 a.m. on the first of May, 1915,near the closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee’sSwamp. The place had always been unusually plagued with strange voices, this being the reasonhe had brought the phonograph, dictaphone, and blank in expectation of results. Former experiencehad told him that May-Eve—the hideous Sabbat-night of underground European legend—wouldprobably 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 wasquasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice which Akeley had never been able toplace. It was not Brown’s, but seemed to be that of a man of greater cultivation. Thesecond voice, however, was the real crux of the thing—for this was the accursed buzzingwhich had no likeness to humanity despite the human words which it uttered in good English grammarand a scholarly accent.

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

(INDISTINGUISHABLE SOUNDS)

(A CULTIVATED MALE HUMAN VOICE)

(A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)

(HUMAN VOICE)

(BUZZING VOICE)

(HUMAN VOICE)

(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 preliminaryscratching of the sapphire point, and I was glad that the first faint, fragmentary words werein a human voice—a mellow, educated voice which seemed vaguely Bostonian in accent, andwhich was certainly not that of any native of the Vermont hills. As I listened to the tantalisinglyfeeble rendering, I seemed to find the speech identical with Akeley’s carefully preparedtranscript. On it chanted, in that mellow Bostonian voice . . . “Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young! . . . “

And then I heard the other voice. To this hour I shudder retrospectivelywhen I think of how it struck me, prepared though I was by Akeley’s accounts. Those towhom I have since described the record profess to find nothing but cheap imposture or madnessin it; but could they have heard the accursed thing itself, or read the bulk of Akeley’scorrespondence (especially that terrible and encyclopaedic second letter), I know they wouldthink differently. It is, after all, a tremendous pity that I did not disobey Akeley and playthe 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 backgroundand surrounding circ*mstances, the voice was a monstrous thing. It swiftly followed the humanvoice in ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid echo winging its way acrossunimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer hells. It is more than two years now since I lastran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at this moment, and at all other moments, I canstill hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time.

But though that voice is always in my ears, I have not even yet been able toanalyse it well enough for a graphic description. It was like the drone of some loathsome, giganticinsect ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an alien species, and I am perfectlycertain that the organs producing it can have no resemblance to the vocal organs of man, orindeed to those of any of the mammalia. There were singularities in timbre, range, and overtoneswhich placed this phenomenon wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life. Its suddenadvent that first time almost stunned me, and I heard the rest of the record through in a sortof abstracted daze. When the longer passage of buzzing came, there was a sharp intensificationof 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 Bostonianvoice; 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, andthat I made exhaustive attempts at analysis and comment in comparing notes with Akeley. It wouldbe both useless and disturbing to repeat here all that we concluded; but I may hint that weagreed in believing we had secured a clue to the source of some of the most repulsive primordialcustoms in the cryptic elder religions of mankind. It seemed plain to us, also, that there wereancient and elaborate alliances between the hidden outer creatures and certain members of thehuman race. How extensive these alliances were, and how their state today might compare withtheir state in earlier ages, we had no means of guessing; yet at best there was room for a limitlessamount of horrified speculation. There seemed to be an awful, immemorial linkage in severaldefinite 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 wasitself merely the populous outpost of a frightful interstellar race whose ultimate source mustlie 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 gettingit to Arkham—Akeley deeming it inadvisable to have me visit him at the scene of his nightmarestudies. For some reason or other, Akeley was afraid to trust the thing to any ordinary or expectedtransportation route. His final idea was to take it across county to Bellows Falls and shipit on the Boston and Maine system through Keene and Winchendon and Fitchburg, even though thiswould necessitate his driving along somewhat lonelier and more forest-traversing hill roadsthan the main highway to Brattleboro. He said he had noticed a man around the express officeat Brattleboro when he had sent the phonograph record, whose actions and expression had beenfar from reassuring. This man had seemed too anxious to talk with the clerks, and had takenthe train on which the record was shipped. Akeley confessed that he had not felt strictly atease about that record until he heard from me of its safe receipt.

About this time—the second week in July—another letter of minewent astray, as I learned through an anxious communication from Akeley. After that he told meto address him no more at Townshend, but to send all mail in care of the General Delivery atBrattleboro; whither he would make frequent trips either in his car or on the motor-coach linewhich had lately replaced passenger service on the lagging branch railway. I could see thathe was getting more and more anxious, for he went into much detail about the increased barkingof the dogs on moonless nights, and about the fresh claw-prints he sometimes found in the roadand in the mud at the back of his farmyard when morning came. Once he told about a veritablearmy of prints drawn up in a line facing an equally thick and resolute line of dog-tracks, andsent a loathsomely disturbing kodak picture to prove it. That was after a night on which thedogs 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 at4:12 p.m. It ought, I calculated, to get up to Arkham at least by the next noon; and accordinglyI stayed in all Thursday morning to receive it. But noon came and went without its advent, andwhen 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 expressagent at the Boston North Station; and I was scarcely surprised to learn that my consignmenthad not appeared. Train No. 5508 had pulled in only 35 minutes late on the day before, but hadcontained 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 followingafternoon, the agent telephoning as soon as he learned the facts. It seemed that the railwayexpress clerk on No. 5508 had been able to recall an incident which might have much bearingon 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 toexpect, but which was neither on the train nor entered on the company’s books. He hadgiven the name of Stanley Adams, and had had such a queerly thick droning voice, that it madethe clerk abnormally dizzy and sleepy to listen to him. The clerk could not remember quite howthe conversation had ended, but recalled starting into a fuller awakeness when the train beganto move. The Boston agent added that this clerk was a young man of wholly unquestioned veracityand reliability, of known antecedents and long with the company.

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

I must admit, however, that all my investigations came to nothing. The queer-voicedman had indeed been noticed around the Keene station in the early afternoon of July 18, andone lounger seemed to couple him vaguely with a heavy box; but he was altogether unknown, andhad not been seen before or since. He had not visited the telegraph office or received any messageso far as could be learned, nor had any message which might justly be considered a notice ofthe black stone’s presence on No. 5508 come through the office for anyone. Naturally Akeleyjoined with me in conducting these inquiries, and even made a personal trip to Keene to questionthe 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 fulfilment of inevitable tendencies,and had no real hope at all of its recovery. He spoke of the undoubted telepathic and hypnoticpowers of the hill creatures and their agents, and in one letter hinted that he did not believethe stone was on this earth any longer. For my part, I was duly enraged, for I had felt therewas 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 immediate subsequentletters brought up a new phase of the whole horrible hill problem which at once seized all myattention.

IV.

The unknown things, Akeley wrote in a script grown pitifully tremulous, hadbegun to close in on him with a wholly new degree of determination. The nocturnal barking ofthe dogs whenever the moon was dim or absent was hideous now, and there had been attempts tomolest him on the lonely roads he had to traverse by day. On the second of August, while boundfor the village in his car, he had found a tree-trunk laid in his path at a point where thehighway ran through a deep patch of woods; while the savage barking of the two great dogs hehad with him told all too well of the things which must have been lurking near. What would havehappened had the dogs not been there, he did not dare guess—but he never went out nowwithout at least two of his faithful and powerful pack. Other road experiences had occurredon August 5th and 6th; a shot grazing his car on one occasion, and the barking of the dogs tellingof unholy woodland presences on the other.

On August 15th I received a frantic letter which disturbed me greatly, andwhich made me wish Akeley could put aside his lonely reticence and call in the aid of the law.There had been frightful happenings on the night of the 12-13th, bullets flying outside thefarmhouse, and three of the twelve great dogs being found shot dead in the morning. There weremyriads of claw-prints in the road, with the human prints of Walter Brown among them. Akeleyhad started to telephone to Brattleboro for more dogs, but the wire had gone dead before hehad a chance to say much. Later he went to Brattleboro in his car, and learned there that linemenhad found the main telephone cable neatly cut at a point where it ran through the deserted hillsnorth of Newfane. But he was about to start home with four fine new dogs, and several casesof ammunition for his big-game repeating rifle. The letter was written at the post office inBrattleboro, and came through to me without delay.

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

But the affair was steadily deepening. Upon my replying to the telegram I receiveda 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 byhim at Bellows Falls had brought out that the message was deposited by a strange sandy-hairedman with a curiously thick, droning voice, though more than this he could not learn. The clerkshewed him the original text as scrawled in pencil by the sender, but the handwriting was whollyunfamiliar. It was noticeable that the signature was misspelled–A-K-E-L-Y, without thesecond “E”. Certain conjectures were inevitable, but amidst the obvious crisis hedid not stop to elaborate upon them.

He spoke of the death of more dogs and the purchase of still others, and ofthe exchange of gunfire which had become a settled feature each moonless night. Brown’sprints, and the prints of at least one or two more shod human figures, were now found regularlyamong 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 Californiason whether or not he could sell the old place. But it was not easy to leave the only spot onecould really think of as home. He must try to hang on a little longer; perhaps he could scareoff the intruders—especially if he openly gave up all further attempts to penetrate theirsecrets.

Writing Akeley at once, I renewed my offers of aid, and spoke again of visitinghim and helping him convince the authorities of his dire peril. In his reply he seemed lessset against that plan than his past attitude would have led one to predict, but said he wouldlike to hold off a little while longer—long enough to get his things in order and reconcilehimself to the idea of leaving an almost morbidly cherished birthplace. People looked askanceat his studies and speculations, and it would be better to get quietly off without setting thecountryside 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 twenty-eighth of August, and I prepared and mailedas encouraging a reply as I could. Apparently the encouragement had effect, for Akeley had fewerterrors to report when he acknowledged my note. He was not very optimistic, though, and expressedthe belief that it was only the full moon season which was holding the creatures off. He hopedthere would not be many densely cloudy nights, and talked vaguely of boarding in Brattleborowhen the moon waned. Again I wrote him encouragingly, but on September 5th there came a freshcommunication which had obviously crossed my letter in the mails; and to this I could not giveany such hopeful response. In view of its importance I believe I had better give it in full—asbest I can do from memory of the shaky script. It ran substantially as follows:

But this was not the only letter from Akeley to cross mine. On the next morning—September6th—still another came; this time a frantic scrawl which utterly unnerved me and put meat a loss what to say or do next. Again I cannot do better than quote the text as faithfullyas memory will let me.

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

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

V.

Then, apparently crossing my incoherent note and reaching me Saturday afternoon,September 8th, came that curiously different and calming letter neatly typed on a new machine;that strange letter of reassurance and invitation which must have marked so prodigious a transitionin the whole nightmare drama of the lonely hills. Again I will quote from memory—seekingfor special reasons to preserve as much of the flavour of the style as I can. It was postmarkedBellows Falls, and the signature as well as the body of the letter was typed—as is frequentwith 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 incollege. To say that the letter relieved me would be only fair, yet beneath my relief lay asubstratum 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? Theentire thing implied such a diametrical reversal of Akeley’s previous attitude! But hereis the substance of the text, carefully transcribed from a memory in which I take some pride.

The complexity of my emotions upon reading, re-reading, and pondering overthis strange and unlooked-for letter is past adequate description. I have said that I was atonce relieved and made uneasy, but this expresses only crudely the overtones of diverse andlargely 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—thechange 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 thepsychological 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 senseof conflicting unrealities made me wonder whether this whole distantly reported drama of fantasticforces were not a kind of half-illusory dream created largely within my own mind. Then I thoughtof the phonograph record and gave way to still greater bewilderment.

The letter seemed so unlike anything which could have been expected! As I analysedmy impression, I saw that it consisted of two distinct phases. First, granting that Akeley hadbeen sane before and was still sane, the indicated change in the situation itself was so swiftand unthinkable. And secondly, the change in Akeley’s own manner, attitude, and languagewas so vastly beyond the normal or the predictable. The man’s whole personality seemedto have undergone an insidious mutation—a mutation so deep that one could scarcely reconcilehis two aspects with the supposition that both represented equal sanity. Word-choice, spelling—allwere subtly different. And with my academic sensitiveness to prose style, I could trace profounddivergences in his commonest reactions and rhythm-responses. Certainly, the emotional cataclysmor revelation which could produce so radical an overturn must be an extreme one indeed! Yetin another way the letter seemed quite characteristic of Akeley. The same old passion for infinity—thesame old scholarly inquisitiveness. I could not a moment—or more than a moment—creditthe idea of spuriousness or malign substitution. Did not the invitation—the willingnessto 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 marvelsbehind the letter I had received. My mind, aching from the quick succession of monstrous conceptionsit had been forced to confront during the last four months, worked upon this startling new materialin a cycle of doubt and acceptance which repeated most of the steps experienced in facing theearlier wonders; till long before dawn a burning interest and curiosity had begun to replacethe 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 perspectivein his hazardous research; some change at once diminishing his danger—real or fancied—andopening dizzy new vistas of cosmic and superhuman knowledge. My own zeal for the unknown flaredup to meet his, and I felt myself touched by the contagion of the morbid barrier-breaking. Toshake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—tobe linked with the vast outside —to come close to the nighted and abysmal secretsof the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a thing was worth the risk of one’slife, soul, and sanity! And Akeley had said there was no longer any peril—he had invitedme to visit him instead of warning me away as before. I tingled at the thought of what he mightnow have to tell me—there was an almost paralysing fascination in the thought of sittingin that lonely and lately beleaguered farmhouse with a man who had talked with actual emissariesfrom outer space; sitting there with the terrible record and the pile of letters in which Akeleyhad summarised his earlier conclusions.

So late Sunday morning I telegraphed Akeley that I would meet him in Brattleboroon 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 insteadof accepting the train he chose I telephoned the station and devised another arrangement. Byrising 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 1:08p.m.—a much more comfortable hour than 10:01 for meeting Akeley and riding with him intothe close-packed, secret-guarding hills.

I mentioned this choice in my telegram, and was glad to learn in the replywhich came toward evening that it had met with my prospective host’s endorsem*nt. Hiswire ran thus:

Receipt of this message in direct response to one sent to Akeley—andnecessarily delivered to his house from the Townshend station either by official messenger orby a restored telephone service—removed any lingering subconscious doubts I may have hadabout the authorship of the perplexing letter. My relief was marked—indeed, it was greaterthan I could account for at that 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 ensuingtwo days.

VI.

On Wednesday I started as agreed, taking with me a valise full of simple necessitiesand scientific data, including the hideous phonograph record, the kodak prints, and the entirefile of Akeley’s correspondence. As requested, I had told no one where I was going; forI 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 mytrained and somewhat prepared mind; and this being so, what might one think of its effect onthe vast masses of uninformed laymen? I do not know whether dread or adventurous expectancywas uppermost in me as I changed trains in Boston and began the long westward run out of familiarregions into those I knew less thoroughly. Waltham—Concord—Ayer—Fitchburg—Gardner—Athol—

My train reached Greenfield seven minutes late, but the northbound connectingexpress had been held. Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbledon through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had neverbefore visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New Englandthan 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, billboards andconcrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals ofthat continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape—thecontinuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil forshadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs.

Now and then I saw the blue Connecticut River gleaming in the sun, and afterleaving Northfield we crossed it. Ahead loomed green and cryptical hills, and when the conductorcame 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 seethe approaching slope of steep Wantastiquet, about which singular old legends cluster. Thenstreets appeared on my left, and a green island shewed in the stream on my right. People roseand filed to the door, and I followed them. The car stopped, and I alighted beneath the longtrain-shed of the Brattleboro station.

Looking over the line of waiting motors I hesitated a moment to see which onemight 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 handand a mellowly phrased query as to whether I was indeed Mr. Albert N. Wilmarth of Arkham. Thisman bore no resemblance to the bearded, grizzled Akeley of the snapshot; but was a younger andmore urban person, fashionably dressed, and wearing only a small, dark moustache. His cultivatedvoice held an odd and almost disturbing hint of vague familiarity, though I could not definitelyplace it in my memory.

As I surveyed him I heard him explaining that he was a friend of my prospectivehost’s who had come down from Townshend in his stead. Akeley, he declared, had suffereda sudden attack of some asthmatic trouble, and did not feel equal to making a trip in the outdoorair. 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 ofAkeley’s researches and discoveries, though it seemed to me that his casual manner stampedhim as a comparative outsider. Remembering what a hermit Akeley had been, I was a trifle surprisedat the ready availability of such a friend; but did not let my puzzlement deter me from enteringthe motor to which he gestured me. It was not the small ancient car I had expected from Akeley’sdescriptions, but a large and immaculate specimen of recent pattern—apparently Noyes’sown, and bearing Massachusetts licence 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 thathe did not overflow with conversation, for some peculiar atmospheric tensity made me feel disinclinedto talk. The town seemed very attractive in the afternoon sunlight as we swept up an inclineand turned to the right into the main street. It drowsed like the older New England cities whichone remembers from boyhood, and something in the collocation of roofs and steeples and chimneysand brick walls formed contours touching deep viol-strings of ancestral emotion. I could tellthat 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 neverbeen 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-pressinggreen and granite slopes hinted at obscure secrets and immemorial survivals which might or mightnot be hostile to mankind. For a time our course followed a broad, shallow river which floweddown from unknown hills in the north, and I shivered when my companion told me it was the WestRiver. It was in this stream, I recalled from newspaper items, that one of the morbid crab-likebeings had been seen floating after the floods.

Gradually the country around us grew wilder and more deserted. Archaic coveredbridges lingered fearsomely out of the past in pockets of the hills, and the half-abandonedrailway 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 virgingranite shewing grey and austere through the verdure that scaled the crests. There were gorgeswhere untamed streams leaped, bearing down toward the river the unimagined secrets of a thousandpathless peaks. Branching away now and then were narrow, half-concealed roads that bored theirway through solid, luxuriant masses of forest among whose primal trees whole armies of elementalspirits might well lurk. As I saw these I thought of how Akeley had been molested by unseenagencies 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 ourlast link with that world which man can definitely call his own by virtue of conquest and completeoccupancy. 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 roseand fell and curved with an almost sentient and purposeful caprice amidst the tenantless greenpeaks and half-deserted valleys. Except for the sound of the motor, and the faint stir of thefew lonely farms we passed at infrequent intervals, the only thing that reached my ears wasthe gurgling, insidious trickle of strange waters from numberless hidden fountains in the shadowywoods.

The nearness and intimacy of the dwarfed, domed hills now became veritablybreath-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, unvisitedwoods on those inaccessible slopes seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I feltthat 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’sletters and exhibits, welled up in my memory to heighten the atmosphere of tension and growingmenace. The purpose of my visit, and the frightful abnormalities it postulated, struck me allat once with a chill sensation that nearly overbalanced my ardour for strange delvings.

My guide must have noticed my disturbed attitude; for as the road grew wilderand more irregular, and our motion slower and more jolting, his occasional pleasant commentsexpanded 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 politequestions it was obvious that he knew I had come for a scientific purpose, and that I was bringingdata of some importance; but he gave no sign of appreciating the depth and awfulness of theknowledge which Akeley had finally reached.

His manner was so cheerful, normal, and urbane that his remarks ought to havecalmed and reassured me; but oddly enough, I felt only the more disturbed as we bumped and veeredonward into the unknown wilderness of hills and woods. At times it seemed as if he were pumpingme to see what I knew of the monstrous secrets of the place, and with every fresh utterancethat vague, teasing, baffling familiarity in his voice increased. It was not an ordinaryor 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 recognisedit. 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 withAkeley himself after my arrival would help greatly to pull me together.

Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnoticlandscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time had lost itself in the labyrinthsbehind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured lovelinessof vanished centuries—the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnalblossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneathvertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernalglamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothinglike 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 vaultingsof Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and Iseemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited, and for which Ihad always been vainly searching.

Suddenly, after rounding an obtuse angle at the top of a sharp ascent, thecar came to a standstill. On my left, across a well-kept lawn which stretched to the road andflaunted a border of whitewashed stones, rose a white, two-and-a-half-story house of unusualsize and elegance for the region, with a congeries 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 mail-box near theroad. For some distance back of the house a level stretch of marshy and sparsely wooded landextended, 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 climbedalready.

Alighting from the car and taking my valise, Noyes asked me to wait while hewent 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 climbedout of the car myself, wishing to stretch my legs a little before settling down to a sedentaryconversation. My feeling of nervousness and tension had risen to a maximum again now that Iwas on the actual scene of the morbid beleaguering described so hauntingly in Akeley’sletters, and I honestly dreaded the coming discussions which were to link me with such alienand 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 thosemonstrous tracks and that foetid green ichor had been found after moonless nights of fear anddeath. Idly I noticed that none of Akeley’s dogs seemed to be about. Had he sold themall as soon as the Outer Ones made peace with him? Try as I might, I could not have the sameconfidence in the depth and sincerity of that peace which appeared in Akeley’s final andqueerly different letter. After all, he was a man of much simplicity and with little worldlyexperience. Was there not, perhaps, some deep and sinister undercurrent beneath the surfaceof the new alliance?

Led by my thoughts, my eyes turned downward to the powdery road surface whichhad held such hideous testimonies. The last few days had been dry, and tracks of all sorts clutteredthe rutted, irregular highway despite the unfrequented nature of the district. With a vaguecuriosity I began to trace the outline of some of the heterogeneous impressions, trying meanwhileto curb the flights of macabre fancy which the place and its memories suggested. There was somethingmenacing and uncomfortable in the funereal stillness, in the muffled, subtle trickle of distantbrooks, 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 menacesand flights of fancy seem mild and insignificant indeed. I have said that I was scanning themiscellaneous prints in the road with a kind of idle curiosity—but all at once that curiositywas shockingly snuffed out by a sudden and paralysing gust of active terror. For though thedust 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 joinedthe 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 owneyes, and surely made not many hours ago, were at least three marks which stood out blasphemouslyamong 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 wasthere 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 hadvisited his house? But the terror was stronger than the reassurance. Could any man be expectedto look unmoved for the first time upon the claw-marks of animate beings from outer depths ofspace? Just then I saw Noyes emerge from the door and approach with a brisk step. I must, Ireflected, keep command of myself, for the chances were this genial friend knew nothing of Akeley’sprofoundest and most stupendous probings into the forbidden.

Akeley, Noyes hastened to inform me, was glad and ready to see me; althoughhis sudden attack of asthma would prevent him from being a very competent host for a day ortwo. These spells hit him hard when they came, and were always accompanied by a debilitatingfever and general weakness. He never was good for much while they lasted—had to talk ina 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 eagerfor conversation. I would find him in the study at the left of the front hall—the roomwhere the blinds were shut. He had to keep the sunlight out when he was ill, for his eyes werevery sensitive.

As Noyes bade me adieu and rode off northward in his car I began to walk slowlytoward the house. The door had been left ajar for me; but before approaching and entering Icast a searching glance around the whole place, trying to decide what had struck me as so intangiblyqueer about it. The barns and sheds looked trimly prosaic enough, and I noticed Akeley’sbattered Ford in its capacious, unguarded shelter. Then the secret of the queerness reachedme. It was the total silence. Ordinarily a farm is at least moderately murmurous from its variouskinds of livestock, but here all signs of life were missing. What of the hens and the hogs?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 gruntingwas truly singular.

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

VII.

Refusing to let these cloudy qualms overmaster me, I recalled Noyes’sinstructions and pushed open the six-panelled, brass-latched white door on my left. The roombeyond was darkened, as I had known before; and as I entered it I noticed that the queer odourwas stronger there. There likewise appeared to be some faint, half-imaginary rhythm or vibrationin the air. For a moment the closed blinds allowed me to see very little, but then a kind ofapologetic 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 faceand hands; and in a moment I had crossed to greet the figure who had tried to speak. Dim thoughthe 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, grizzledbeard.

But as I looked again my recognition was mixed with sadness and anxiety; forcertainly, this face was that of a very sick man. I felt that there must be something more thanasthma behind that strained, rigid, immobile expression and unwinking glassy stare; and realisedhow terribly the strain of his frightful experiences must have told on him. Was it not enoughto 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 ageneral breakdown. There was a touch of the pitiful in the limp, lifeless way his lean handsrested in his lap. He had on a loose dressing-gown, and was swathed around the head and higharound the neck with a vivid yellow scarf or hood.

And then I saw that he was trying to talk in the same hacking whisper withwhich he had greeted me. It was a hard whisper to catch at first, since the grey moustache concealedall movements of the lips, and something in its timbre disturbed me greatly; but by concentratingmy attention I could soon make out its purport surprisingly well. The accent was by no meansa 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 knowwhat I wrote in my last letter—there is so much to tell you tomorrow when I shall feelbetter. I can’t say how glad I am to see you in person after all our many letters. Youhave the file with you, of course? And the kodak prints and record? Noyes put your valise inthe hall—I suppose you saw it. For tonight I fear you’ll have to wait on yourselfto a great extent. Your room is upstairs—the one over this—and you’ll seethe bathroom door open at the head of the staircase. There’s a meal spread for you inthe dining-room—right through this door at your right—which you can take wheneveryou feel like it. I’ll be a better host tomorrow—but just now weakness leaves mehelpless.”

“Make yourself at home—you might take out the letters and picturesand record and put them on the table here before you go upstairs with your bag. It is here thatwe shall discuss them—you can see my phonograph on that corner stand.”

“No, thanks—there’s nothing you can do for me. I know thesespells of old. Just come back for a little quiet visiting before night, and then go to bed whenyou please. I’ll rest right here—perhaps sleep here all night as I often do. Inthe 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 menon this earth, there will be opened up gulfs of time and space and knowledge beyond anythingwithin the conception of human science and philosophy.”

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

“There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towersbuilt of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sunshines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other, subtlersenses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers andconfuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space wherethey came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad—yet I am goingthere. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious Cyclopean bridges—thingsbuilt by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the things came to Yuggoth from the ultimatevoids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enoughto tell what he has seen.”

“But remember—that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowlesscities isn’t really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this worldseemed just as terrible to the beings when they first explored it in the primal age. You knowthey were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunkenR’lyeh when it was above the waters. They’ve been inside the earth, too—thereare openings which human beings know nothing of—some of them in these very Vermont hills—andgreat 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—youknow, 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’clockby this time. Better bring the stuff from your bag, take a bite, and then come back for a comfortablechat.”

Very slowly I turned and began to obey my host; fetching my valise, extractingand depositing the desired articles, and finally ascending to the room designated as mine. Withthe memory of that roadside claw-print fresh in my mind, Akeley’s whispered paragraphshad affected me queerly; and the hints of familiarity with this unknown world of fungous life—forbiddenYuggoth—made my flesh creep more than I cared to own. I was tremendously sorry about Akeley’sillness, 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 themusty odour and disturbing sense of vibration; and after leaving my valise there I descendedagain to greet Akeley and take the lunch he had set out for me. The dining-room was just beyondthe study, and I saw that a kitchen ell extended still farther in the same direction. On thedining-table an ample array of sandwiches, cake, and cheese awaited me, and a Thermos-bottlebeside a cup and saucer testified that hot coffee had not been forgotten. After a well-relishedmeal I poured myself a liberal cup of coffee, but found that the culinary standard had suffereda lapse in this one detail. My first spoonful revealed a faintly unpleasant acrid taste, sothat I did not take more. Throughout the lunch I thought of Akeley sitting silently in the greatchair in the darkened next room. Once I went in to beg him to share the repast, but he whisperedthat he could eat nothing as yet. Later on, just before he slept, he would take some maltedmilk—all he ought to have that day.

After lunch I insisted on clearing the dishes away and washing them in thekitchen 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 preparedfor such conversation as he might feel inclined to conduct. The letters, pictures, and recordwere still on the large centre-table, but for the nonce we did not have to draw upon them. Beforelong I forgot even the bizarre odour and curious suggestions of vibration.

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

Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity—neverwas an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and forceand symmetry. I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary starsof history had flared forth. I guessed—from hints which made even my informant pause timidly—thesecret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth veiled by theimmemorial allegory of Tao. The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I was told theessence (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 nuclearchaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the nameof Azathoth. It was shocking to have the foulest nightmares of secret myth cleared up in concreteterms 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 havehad discourse with Akeley’s Outer Ones, and perhaps have visited outer cosmic realms asAkeley now proposed visiting them.

I was told of the Black Stone and what it implied, and was glad that it hadnot reached me. My guesses about those hieroglyphics had been all too correct! And yet Akeleynow seemed reconciled to the whole fiendish system he had stumbled upon; reconciled and eagerto probe farther into the monstrous abyss. I wondered what beings he had talked with since hislast letter to me, and whether many of them had been as human as that first emissary he hadmentioned. The tension in my head grew insufferable, and I built up all sorts of wild theoriesabout the 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 thoseearlier nights I shuddered to think there would be no moon. Nor did I like the way the farmhousenestled in the lee of that colossal forested slope leading up to Dark Mountain’s unvisitedcrest. With Akeley’s permission I lighted a small oil lamp, turned it low, and set iton a distant bookcase beside the ghostly bust of Milton; but afterward I was sorry I had doneso, for it made my host’s strained, immobile face and listless hands look damnably abnormaland corpse-like. 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 hewas saving for the morrow; but at last it developed that his trip to Yuggoth and beyond— andmy own possible participation in it —was to be the next day’s topic. He musthave 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 shewed my fear. Subsequently he spoke very gently of howhuman beings might accomplish—and several times had accomplished—the seemingly impossibleflight across the interstellar void. It seemed that complete human bodies did not indeedmake the trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skillof the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains without their concomitant physicalstructure.

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

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

“There are four kinds of instruments here, Wilmarth”, whisperedthe voice. “Four kinds—three faculties each—makes twelve pieces in all. Yousee there are four different sorts of beings presented 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 thecentral caverns of an especially interesting dark star beyond the galaxy. In the principal outpostinside Round Hill you’ll now and then find more cylinders and machines—cylindersof extra-cosmic brains with different senses from any we know—allies and explorers fromthe uttermost Outside—and special machines for giving them impressions and expressionin 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 forexperiment.

“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 andsounding-board—and now the one with the metal disc on top. Now for the cylinder with thelabel “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 cylinderjoined to the two testing instruments—the one with my name on it. Set B-67 on the tablenear where you’ve put the machines—and see that the dial switch on all three machinesis jammed over to the extreme left.”

“Now connect the cord of the lens machine with the upper socket on thecylinder—there! Join the tube machine to the lower left-hand socket, and the disc apparatusto the outer socket. Now move all the dial switches on the machines over to the extreme right—firstthe lens one, then the disc one, and then the tube one. That’s right. I might as welltell you that this is a human being—just like any of us. I’ll give you a taste ofsome of the others tomorrow.”

To this day I do not know why I obeyed those whispers so slavishly, or whetherI thought Akeley was mad or sane. After what had gone before, I ought to have been preparedfor anything; but this mechanical mummery seemed so like the typical vagaries of crazed inventorsand 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 stillfarther beyond, and less preposterous only because of their remoteness from tangible concreteproof?

As my mind reeled amidst this chaos, I became conscious of a mixed gratingand whirring from all three machines lately linked to the cylinder—a grating andwhirring which soon subsided into a virtual noiselessness. What was about to happen? Was I tohear a voice? And if so, what proof would I have that it was not some cleverly concocted radiodevice talked into by a concealed but closely watching speaker? Even now I am unwilling to swearjust what I heard, or just what phenomenon really took place before me. But something certainlyseemed 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 presentand observing us. The voice was loud, metallic, lifeless, and plainly mechanical in every detailof its production. It was incapable of inflection or expressiveness, but scraped and rattledon with a deadly precision and deliberation.

“Mr. Wilmarth”, it said, “I hope I do not startle you. Iam a human being like yourself, though my body is now resting safely under proper vitalisingtreatment inside Round Hill, about a mile and a half east of here. I myself am here with you—mybrain is in that cylinder and I see, hear, and speak through these electronic vibrators. Ina week I am going across the void as I have been many times before, and I expect to have thepleasure of Mr. Akeley’s company. I wish I might have yours as well; for I know you bysight 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 havegiven me experiences such as few men have ever had.”

“Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-sevendifferent celestial bodies—planets, dark stars, and less definable objects—includingeight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time? All this has notharmed me in the least. My brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that itwould be crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting beings have methods which make theseextractions easy and almost normal—and one’s body never ages when the brain is outof it. The brain, I may add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a limitednourishment 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 shew themthe great abysses that most of us have had to dream about in fanciful ignorance. It may seemstrange at first to meet them, but I know you will be above minding that. I think Mr. Noyeswill go along, too—the man who doubtless brought you up here in his car. He has been oneof us for years—I suppose you recognised his voice as one of those on the record Mr. Akeleysent you.”

At my violent start the speaker paused a moment before concluding.

“So, Mr. Wilmarth, I will leave the matter to you; merely adding thata 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 whollymechanised state of sensation. When the electrodes are disconnected, one merely drops off intoa sleep of especially vivid and fantastic dreams.”

“And now, if you don’t mind, we might adjourn our session tilltomorrow. Good night—just turn all the switches back to the left; never mind the exactorder, though you might let the lens machine be last. Good night, Mr. Akeley—treat ourguest well! Ready now with those switches?”

That was all. I obeyed mechanically and shut off all three switches, thoughdazed with doubt of everything that had occurred. My head was still reeling as I heard Akeley’swhispering 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 conveyedmuch 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 hisdiscourse of the afternoon and evening had been such as to exhaust even a vigorous man. Stilldazed, I bade my host good night and went upstairs with the lamp, although I had an excellentpocket flashlight with me.

I was glad to be out of that downstairs study with the queer odour and vaguesuggestions of vibration, yet could not of course escape a hideous sense of dread and periland cosmic abnormality as I thought of the place I was in and the forces I was meeting. Thewild, lonely region, the black, mysteriously forested slope towering so close behind the house,the footprints in the road, the sick, motionless whisperer in the dark, the hellish cylindersand machines, and above all the invitations to strange surgery and stranger voyagings—thesethings, all so new and in such sudden succession, rushed in on me with a cumulative force whichsapped my will and almost undermined my physical strength.

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

It occurred to me that this whispering was different from anything else ofthe kind I had ever heard; that, despite the curious motionlessness of the speaker’s moustache-screenedlips, it had a latent strength and carrying-power remarkable for the wheezings of an asthmatic.I had been able to understand the speaker when wholly across the room, and once or twice ithad seemed to me that the faint but penetrant sounds represented not so much weakness as deliberaterepression—for what reason I could not guess. From the first I had felt a disturbing qualityin their timbre. Now, when I tried to weigh the matter, I thought I could trace this impressionto a kind of subconscious familiarity like that which had made Noyes’s voice so hazilyominous. 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 scientificzeal had vanished amidst fear and loathing, and I felt nothing now but a wish to escape fromthis net of morbidity and unnatural revelation. I knew enough now. It must indeed be true thatcosmic linkages do exist—but such things are surely not meant for normal human beingsto 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 threwmyself 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 flashlightin my left. Not a sound came from below, and I could imagine how my host was sitting there withcadaverous stiffness in the dark.

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

VIII.

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

You will also, of course, discount everything else in my report; and declarethat all the pictures, record-sounds, cylinder-and-machine sounds, and kindred evidences werebits of pure deception practiced on me by the missing Henry Akeley. You will even hint thathe conspired with other eccentrics to carry out a silly and elaborate hoax—that he hadthe express shipment removed at Keene, and that he had Noyes make that terrifying wax record.It is odd, though, that Noyes has not even yet been identified; that he was unknown at any ofthe villages near Akeley’s place, though he must have been frequently in the region. Iwish I had stopped to memorise the licence-number of his car—or perhaps it is better afterall that I did not. For I, despite all you can say, and despite all I sometimes try to say tomyself, know that loathsome outside influences must be lurking there in the half-unknown hills—andthat those influences have spies and emissaries in the world of men. To keep as far as possiblefrom 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, Akeleywas gone without leaving a trace. His loose dressing-gown, yellow scarf, and foot-bandages layon the study floor near his corner easy-chair, and it could not be decided whether any of hisother apparel had vanished with him. The dogs and livestock were indeed missing, and there weresome 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 evidencesI had brought in my valise, no queer odour or vibration-sense, no footprints in the road, andnone of the problematical things I glimpsed at the very last.

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

They said, too, that suspicious sights and sounds had been noticed increasinglyaround Akeley’s house after he found the black stone, and that the place was now avoidedby everybody except the mail man and other casual, tough-minded people. Dark Mountain and RoundHill were both notoriously haunted spots, and I could find no one who had ever closely exploredeither. Occasional disappearances of natives throughout the district’s history were wellattested, and these now included the semi-vagabond Walter Brown, whom Akeley’s lettershad mentioned. I even came upon one farmer who thought he had personally glimpsed one of thequeer bodies at flood-time in the swollen West River, but his tale was too confused to be reallyvaluable.

When I left Brattleboro I resolved never to go back to Vermont, and I feelquite certain I shall keep my resolution. Those wild hills are surely the outpost of a frightfulcosmic race—as I doubt all the less since reading that a new ninth planet has been glimpsedbeyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with ahideous 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 tryto figure out the real reason why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known in thisway at this especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures arenot 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 whichinvolved monstrous landscape-glimpses. Just what awaked me I cannot yet say, but that I didindeed awake at this given point I feel very certain. My first confused impression was of stealthilycreaking floor-boards in the hall outside my door, and of a clumsy, muffled fumbling at thelatch. This, however, ceased almost at once; so that my really clear impressions began withthe voices heard from the study below. There seemed to be several speakers, and I judged thatthey were controversially engaged.

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

A third voice was indubitably that of a mechanical utterance-machine connectedwith one of the detached brains in the cylinders. There was as little doubt about that as aboutthe 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 beenutterly unforgettable. For a time I did not pause to question whether the intelligence behindthe scraping was the identical one which had formerly talked to me; but shortly afterward Ireflected that any brain would emit vocal sounds of the same quality if linked to thesame 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—onethe crude speech of an unknown and evidently rustic man, and the other the suave Bostonian tonesof my erstwhile guide Noyes.

As I tried to catch the words which the stoutly fashioned floor so bafflinglyintercepted, I was also conscious of a great deal of stirring and scratching and shuffling inthe room below; so that I could not escape the impression that it was full of living beings—manymore than the few whose speech I could single out. The exact nature of this stirring is extremelyhard to describe, for very few good bases of comparison exist. Objects seemed now and then tomove across the room like conscious entities; the sound of their footfalls having somethingabout it like a loose, hard-surfaced clattering—as of the contact of ill-coördinatedsurfaces 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 polishedboard floor. On the nature and appearance of those responsible for the sounds, I did not careto speculate.

Before long I saw that it would be impossible to distinguish any connecteddiscourse. Isolated words—including the names of Akeley and myself—now and thenfloated up, especially when uttered by the mechanical speech-producer; but their true significancewas lost for want of continuous context. Today I refuse to form any definite deductions fromthem, 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 shockingdeliberations I could not tell. It was curious how this unquestioned sense of the malign andthe blasphemous pervaded me despite Akeley’s assurances of the Outsiders’ friendliness.

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

I will try to set down some of the few disjointed words and other sounds Icaught, labelling the speakers of the words as best I know how. It was from the speech-machinethat I first picked up a few recognisable phrases.

(THE SPEECH-MACHINE)

(FIRST BUZZING VOICE)

(SECOND BUZZING VOICE)

(NOYES)

(FIRST BUZZING VOICE)

(NOYES)

(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 strangeupstairs 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 tilllong after the last echoes of the sounds had died away. I heard the wooden, deliberate tickingof the ancient Connecticut clock somewhere far below, and at last made out the irregular snoringof a sleeper. Akeley must have dozed off after the strange session, and I could well believethat he needed to do so.

Just what to think or what to do was more than I could decide. After all, whathad I heard beyond things which previous information might have led me to expect? HadI not known that the nameless Outsiders were now freely admitted to the farmhouse? No doubtAkeley had been surprised by an unexpected visit from them. Yet something in that fragmentarydiscourse had chilled me immeasurably, raised the most grotesque and horrible doubts, and mademe wish fervently that I might wake up and prove everything a dream. I think my subconsciousmind 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 peacefulsnoring 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 drawme into the hills with the letters and pictures and phonograph record? Did those beings meanto engulf us both in a common destruction because we had come to know too much? Again I thoughtof the abruptness and unnaturalness of that change in the situation which must have occurredbetween Akeley’s penultimate and final letters. Something, my instinct told me, was terriblywrong. All was not as it seemed. That acrid coffee which I refused—had there not beenan attempt by some hidden, unknown entity to drug it? I must talk to Akeley at once, and restorehis 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 helacked the will power to make the break for liberty, I would supply it. Or if I could not persuadehim to go, I could at least go myself. Surely he would let me take his Ford and leave it ina garage at Brattleboro. I had noticed it in the shed—the door being left unlocked andopen now that peril was deemed past—and I believed there was a good chance of its beingready for instant use. That momentary dislike of Akeley which I had felt during and after theevening’s conversation was all gone now. He was in a position much like my own, and wemust 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 commandof my muscles. Arising with a caution more impulsive than deliberate, I found and donned myhat, took my valise, and started downstairs with the flashlight’s aid. In my nervousnessI kept the revolver clutched in my right hand, being able to take care of both valise and flashlightwith my left. Why I exerted these precautions I do not really know, since I was even then onmy 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 thesleeper more plainly, and noticed that he must be in the room on my left—the living-roomI had not entered. On my right was the gaping blackness of the study in which I had heard thevoices. Pushing open the unlatched door of the living-room I traced a path with the flashlighttoward 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 cat-like retreat to the hall,my caution this time springing from reason as well as from instinct. For the sleeper on thecouch was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.

Just what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common sense toldme that the safest thing was to find out as much as possible before arousing anybody. Regainingthe hall, I silently closed and latched the living-room door after me; thereby lessening thechances of awaking Noyes. I now cautiously entered the dark study, where I expected to findAkeley, whether asleep or awake, in the great corner chair which was evidently his favouriteresting-place. As I advanced, the beams of my flashlight caught the great centre-table, revealingone of the hellish cylinders with sight and hearing machines attached, and with a speech-machinestanding close by, ready to be connected at any moment. This, I reflected, must be the encasedbrain I had heard talking during the frightful conference; and for a second I had a perverseimpulse 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 andhearing attachments could not fail to disclose the rays of my flashlight and the faint creakingof the floor beneath my feet. But in the end I did not dare meddle with the thing. I idly sawthat it was the fresh, shiny cylinder with Akeley’s name on it, which I had noticed onthe shelf earlier in the evening and which my host had told me not to bother. Looking back atthat moment, I can only regret my timidity and wish that I had boldly caused the apparatus tospeak. God knows what mysteries and horrible doubts and questions of identity it might havecleared 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 Akeleywas, but found to my perplexity that the great easy-chair was empty of any human occupant asleepor 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 discardedhis necessary sick-room garments, I observed that the queer odour and sense of vibration wereno longer in the room. What had been their cause? Curiously it occurred to me that I had noticedthem only in Akeley’s vicinity. They had been strongest where he sat, and wholly absentexcept in the room with him or just outside the doors of that room. I paused, letting the flashlightwander 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 torest again on the vacant chair. As it turned out, I did not leave quietly; but with a muffledshriek which must have disturbed, though it did not quite awake, the sleeping sentinel acrossthe hall. That shriek, and Noyes’s still-unbroken snore, are the last sounds I ever heardin that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded crest of a haunted mountain—thatfocus of trans-cosmic horror amidst the lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectralrustic land.

It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver in my wildscramble, but somehow I failed to lose any of these. I actually managed to get out of that roomand that house without making any further noise, to drag myself and my belongings safely intothe old Ford in the shed, and to set that archaic vehicle in motion toward some unknown pointof safety in the black, moonless night. The ride that followed was a piece of delirium out ofPoe or Rimbaud or the drawings of Doré, 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, especiallysince that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.

As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair afterits circuit of the room; then noticing for the first time the presence of certain objects inthe seat, made inconspicuous by the adjacent loose folds of the empty dressing-gown. These arethe 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 wasin what they led one to infer. Even now I have my moments of half-doubt—moments in whichI half accept the scepticism of those who attribute my whole experience to dream and nervesand delusion.

The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and werefurnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic developments of which I darenot form any conjecture. I hope—devoutly hope—that they were the waxen productsof a master artist, despite what my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darknesswith its morbid odour and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider . . .that hideous repressed buzzing . . . and all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinderon the shelf . . . poor devil . . . “prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill”. . .

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

I.

During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secretinvestigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The publicfirst learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followedby the deliberate burning and dynamiting—under suitable precautions—of an enormousnumber 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 onliquor.

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 disposalof the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported; nor were any of the captivesseen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about diseaseand concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, butnothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and is even nowonly beginning to shew signs of a sluggishly revived existence.

Complaints from many liberal organisations were met with long confidentialdiscussions, 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 coöperate with the government in the end. Only one paper—atabloid always discounted because of its wild policy—mentioned the deep-diving submarinethat discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That item, gatheredby chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather far-fetched; since the low, black reeflies a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.

People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal amongthemselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-desertedInnsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what theyhad whispered and hinted years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and therewas now no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew very little; for wide saltmarshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours 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 accruefrom a hinting of what was found by those horrified raiders at Innsmouth. Besides, what wasfound might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the wholetale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. Formy contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carriedaway impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.

It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours ofJuly 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on thewhole 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 cravingto whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaportof death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in myown faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagiousnightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terriblestep which lies ahead of me.

I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and—sofar—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 Newburyportto Arkham, whence my mother’s family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling bytrain, trolley, and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyportthey told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the stationticket-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 myefforts 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 acertain hesitation, “but it ain’t thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth—youmay have heard about that—and so the people don’t like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow—JoeSargent—but never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keepsrunning at all. I s’pose it’s cheap enough, but I never see more’n two orthree people in it—nobody but those Innsmouth folks. Leaves the Square—front ofHammond’s Drug Store—at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they’ve changed lately.Looks like a terrible rattletrap—I’ve never ben on it.”

That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a townnot shewn on common maps or listed in recent guide-books would have interested me, and the agent’sodd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislikein its neighbours, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist’sattention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there—and so I asked the agent totell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightlysuperior to what he said.

“Innsmouth? Well, it’s a queer kind of a town down at the mouthof the Manuxet. Used to be almost a city—quite a port before the War of 1812—butall gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now—B. & M. neverwent through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years ago.”

“More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business tospeak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly here or in Arkham orIpswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing’s left now except one gold refineryrunning on the leanest kind of part time.”

“That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and Old Man Marsh, whoowns it, must be richer’n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close inhis home. He’s supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in lifethat makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business.His mother seems to’ve ben some kind of foreigner—they say a South Sea islander—soeverybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do that aboutInnsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood theyhave in ’em. But Marsh’s children and grandchildren look just like anyone else sofar’s I can see. I’ve had ’em pointed out to me here—though, come tothink 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’ttake too much stock in what people around here say. They’re hard to get started, but oncethey do get started they never let up. They’ve ben telling things about Innsmouth—whispering’em, mostly—for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather they’re morescared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh—about old CaptainMarsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, orabout some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that peoplestumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts—but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kindof story don’t go down with me.”

“You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about theblack reef off the coast—Devil Reef, they call it. It’s well above water a goodpart of the time, and never much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. Thestory is that there’s a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef—sprawledabout, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. It’s a rugged, uneventhing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to makebig detours just to avoid it.”

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

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

“But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice—andI 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 seeyou’re a Westerner by your talk—what a lot our New England ships used to have todo with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kindsof people they sometimes brought back with ’em. You’ve probably heard about theSalem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there’s still a bunchof 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 wecan’t be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but it’s pretty clear that oldCaptain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships incommission back in the twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak inthe Innsmouth folks today—I don’t know how to explain it, but it sort of makes youcrawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queernarrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’tquite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up.Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst—fact is, I don’t believeI’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 autos came in.”

“Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to dowith ’em, and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town or when anyonetries to fish on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off Innsmouth Harbour when thereain’t any anywhere else around—but just try to fish there yourself and see how thefolks chase you off! Those people used to come here on the railroad—walking and takingthe 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—butI don’t believe it can amount to much. I wouldn’t advise you to try it. Better stayover here and take the ten o’clock bus tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening busthere for Arkham at eight o’clock. There was a factory inspector who stopped at the Gilmana couple of years ago, and he had a lot of unpleasant hints about the place. Seems they geta queer crowd there, for this fellow heard voices in other rooms—though most of ’emwas empty—that gave him the shivers. It was foreign talk, he thought, but he said thebad 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 outthe first thing in the morning. The talk went on most all night.”

“This fellow—Casey, his name was—had a lot to say about howthe Innsmouth folks watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a queerplace—it’s in an old mill on the lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said talliedup with what I’d heard. Books in bad shape, and no clear account of any kind of dealings.You know it’s always ben 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 anenormous lot of ingots.”

“Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewellery that the sailorsand refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on some of the Marshwomenfolks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in some heathen port, especiallysince he was always ordering stacks of glass beads and trinkets such as seafaring men used toget for native trade. Others thought and still think he’d found an old pirate cache outon Devil Reef. But here’s a funny thing. The old Captain’s ben dead these sixtyyears, and there ain’t ben a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; butjust the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things—mostlyglass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like ’em to look atthemselves—Gawd knows they’ve gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals andGuinea 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 the other rich folks are as badas any. As I told you, there probably ain’t more’n 400 people in the whole townin 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 doings.They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhereelse. “

“Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officialsand census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain’t welcomearound Innsmouth. I’ve heard personally of more’n one business or government manthat’s disappeared there, and there’s loose talk of one who went crazy and is outat 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’venever ben there and have no wish to go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn’t hurt you—eventhough 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 lookingup data about Innsmouth. When I had tried to question the natives in the shops, the lunch room,the garages, and the fire station, I had found them even harder to get started than the ticket-agenthad predicted; and realised that I could not spare the time to overcome their first instinctivereticences. They had a kind of obscure suspiciousness, as if there were something amiss withanyone too much interested in Innsmouth. At the Y.M.C.A., where I was stopping, the clerk merelydiscouraged my going to such a dismal, decadent place; and the people at the library shewedmuch the same attitude. Clearly, in the eyes of the educated, Innsmouth was merely an exaggeratedcase of civic degeneration.

The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say, exceptthat the town was founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution, a seat of greatmarine prosperity in the early nineteenth century, and later a minor factory centre using theManuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of 1846 were very sparsely treated, as if they formeda discredit to the county.

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later recordwas unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh RefiningCompany, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce asidefrom the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity felland large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish aroundInnsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidencethat a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drasticfashion.

Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelleryvaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more thana 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 descriptionsof 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—saidto be a large, queerly proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara—if it could possiblybe 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 gentlewomanwas 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 thebizarre object which glistened in a corner cupboard under the electric lights.

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at thestrange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvetcushion. 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 irregularperiphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemedto be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy withan equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, andone could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs—somesimply geometrical, and some plainly marine—chased or moulded in high relief on its surfacewith a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascinationthere was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. At firstI decided that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All otherart objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known racial or national stream, or elsewere consciously modernistic defiances of every recognised stream. This tiara was neither. Itclearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that techniquewas utterly remote from any—Eastern or Western, ancient or modern—which I had everheard 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 potentsource residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestions of the strange designs. The patternsall hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonouslyaquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monstersof abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity—half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion—whichone could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudo-memory, asif they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are whollyprimal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogswas overflowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.

In odd contrast to the tiara’s aspect was its brief and prosy historyas related by Miss Tilton. It had been pawned for a ridiculous sum at a shop in State Streetin 1873, by a drunken Innsmouth man shortly afterward killed in a brawl. The Society had acquiredit directly from the pawnbroker, at once giving it a display worthy of its quality. It was labelledas of probable East-Indian or Indo-Chinese provenance, though the attribution was frankly tentative.

Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin and itspresence in New England, was inclined to believe that it formed part of some exotic pirate hoarddiscovered by old Captain Obed Marsh. This view was surely not weakened by the insistent offersof 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 notto sell.

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

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

All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for shunningthe ancient town of decay and desolation; but to me it was merely a fresh incentive. To my architecturaland historical anticipations was now added an acute anthropological zeal, and I could scarcelysleep 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 frontof Hammond’s Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hourfor 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 thedislike which local people bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a smallmotor-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 whichthe half-illegible sign on the windshield— “Arkham-Innsmouth-Newb’port” —soonverified.

There were only three passengers—dark, unkempt men of sullen visage andsomewhat youthful cast—and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and beganwalking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and Iwatched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must bethe Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spreadover me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenlystruck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and drivenby 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 triedto determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not muchunder six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed grey golfcap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck madehim 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 singularlyundeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardlessexcept for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in placesthe surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands werelarge and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikinglyshort in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closelyinto the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait andsaw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered howhe could buy any shoes to fit them.

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

I was sorry when I saw that 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 obviouslyapproached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill andmurmuring the single word “Innsmouth”. He looked curiously at me for a second ashe returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the sameside of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.

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

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

Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls abovethe 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, camesimultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of 1846, and was thought by simple folk to have adark connexion with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting ofwoodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of its best protection and opened the way forwaves of wind-blown sand.

At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlanticon our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquietin looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted roadway met the sky. It was as if thebus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging withthe 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, havingonly a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.

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

It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentousdearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and thethree tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them wascrumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes whereclock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyedwith offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descendingroad I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgianhouses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed “widow’s walks”. Thesewere 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 carriageroads to Rowley and Ipswich.

The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I couldspy 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 Icould begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were whatlooked 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 onlydeep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southwardto join the ocean at the breakwater’s end.

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

We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varyingstages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windowsand shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-lookingpeople working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groupsof dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these peopleseemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiaritiesof face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehendthem. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhapsin a book, under circ*mstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollectionpassed very quickly.

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

Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leadingto shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas ofdeparted grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparsehabitation—curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motor-car at thecurb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well defined, and though most of the houses werequite old—wood and brick structures of the early nineteenth century—they were obviouslykept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and myfeeling 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 ofpoignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial pointwith churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, andI was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure’sonce white paint was now grey and peeling, and the black and gold sign on the pediment was sofaded 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 todecipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell acrossthe street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.

The sound came from a squat-towered stone church of manifestly later date thanmost of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basem*ntwith shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, Iknew that those hoarse strokes were telling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts oftime were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror whichhad seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basem*nt was open, revealinga rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to crossthat dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was allthe 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 sinceentering the compact part of the town—and had I been in a steadier mood I would have foundnothing 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 theritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glanceand supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicateof the one Miss Tilton had shewn me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, hadsupplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneathit. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch ofevil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentalsan unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way—perhapsas treasure-trove?

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

I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valisein the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight—an elderly man without whatI had come to call the “Innsmouth look” —and I decided not to ask him any ofthe 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 thescene 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 whichseveral streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressinglyfew and small—all low-powered incandescents—and I was glad that my plans calledfor departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were allin fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one wasa grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesalefish-dealer’s office, and still another, at the eastern extremity of the square near theriver, an office of the town’s only industry—the Marsh Refining Company. There wereperhaps 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 catchblue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautifulGeorgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfrysurmounting 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 seventeenin 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, itsfishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailedfrom Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back home whenever he gota moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferredhim 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 thatwere the fine old residence streets—Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams—andeast of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums—along Main Street—thatI would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well notto make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods—especially north of the river—sincethe people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.

Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerablecost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of thestill used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churcheswere very odd—all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, andapparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds wereheterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvellous transformations leading to bodilyimmortality—of a sort—on this earth. The youth’s own pastor—Dr. Wallaceof 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 imaginehow they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps—judging from thequantities of bootleg liquor they consumed—they lay for most of the daylight hours inan alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding—despisingthe world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance—especiallythose 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 30thand 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 toshare in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather youngpeople 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 oldclerk 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 increasedits hold as years advanced.

Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radicalanatomical changes in a single individual after maturity—changes involving osseous factorsas basic as the shape of the skull—but then, even this aspect was no more baffling andunheard-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 nativespersonally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.

The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visibleones 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—thesebeings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive charactersout of sight when government agents and others from the outside world came to town.

It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything aboutthe place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal-looking man who lived at thepoorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around thefire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was ninety-six years old and somewhat touchedin the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantlylooked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded totalk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favourite 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 storieswere all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no sourcesave in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like himto drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. Itwas 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 denizens it was no wonder such illusionswere current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespreadimpression 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, butthe natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competitionwas growing. Of course the town’s real business was the refinery, whose commercial officewas on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, butsometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.

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

One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who worean excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strangetiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as comingfrom some secret hoard, either of pirates or of daemons. The clergymen—or priests, orwhatever they were called nowadays—also wore this kind of ornament as a head-dress; butone seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many wererumoured to exist around Innsmouth.

The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town—theWaites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots—were all very retiring. They lived in immense housesalong Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolkwhose 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 benefita rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town’s salient features. After a moment’sstudy I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Dislikingthe dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackersand ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My programme, I decided, would be to threadthe principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o’clockcoach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communaldecay; 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’snarrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls,I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed oddly free from the noise of industry. Thisbuilding stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets whichI took to be the earliest civic centre, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.

Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utterdesertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jaggedand 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 unpavedside streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilousand incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared sospectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terrorof a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiplyto form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancyand death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given overto cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions thatnot even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.

Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brickand stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save thatthere were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see, except forthe scattered fishermen on the distant breakwater, and not a sound did I hear save the lappingof the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more andmore on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the totteringWater 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-packinghouses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional soundsfrom indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpavedlanes—but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. Forone 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 notquite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than fartherinland—unless, indeed, the “Innsmouth look” were a disease rather than a bloodstrain, 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 soundsI heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet inreality 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 tunnelssuggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizenswould be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious notto do so.

Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Mainand Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was NewChurch Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basem*nt Ihad glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademed priest or pastor.Besides, the grocery youth had told me that the 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, crossingFederal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood ofnorthern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues wereill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion aftermansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, butone or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row offour or five in excellent repair and with finely tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuousof these—with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street—Itook 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 completeabsense of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, evenin some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-storyand attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienageand death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand bysly, 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 Streettoward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins ofa factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railwaybridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.

The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I tookthe risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shamblingcreatures 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 Squarein the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-timeof that sinister bus.

It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticedthe red-faced, bushy-bearded, watery-eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench infront 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 andits shadow were so hideous and incredible.

III.

It must have been some imp of the perverse—or some sardonic pull fromdark, hidden sources—which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before resolvedto limit my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then hurrying toward the Squarein an effort to get quick transportation out of this festering city of death and decay; butthe 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 talkingto him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town’s decay, with memories goingback to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could makeme resist. After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegoriesbased upon truth—and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on around Innsmouthfor the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthfulegotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagantoutpouring 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 surelynotice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at aplace where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire stationin apparent casualness, and fall in with old Zadok after he had started on one of his frequentrambles. The youth said that he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for morethan an hour or two at a time.

A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rearof a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waitedon 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, andthe like—as were occasionally in town.

Reëntering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for—shufflingout of Paine Street around the corner of the Gilman House—I glimpsed nothing less thanthe tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attractedhis attention by brandishing my newly purchased bottle; and soon realised that he had begunto shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on my way to the most deserted regionI could think of.

I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aimingfor the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. Theonly people in sight there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going afew squares south I could get beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandonedwharf and being free to question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reachedMain Street I could hear a faint and wheezy “Hey, Mister!” behind me, and I presentlyallowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls from the quart bottle.

I began putting out feelers as we walked along to Water Street and turned southwardamidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue didnot loosen as quickly as I had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the seabetween crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projectingbeyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised tolerable seats, and the scenewas sheltered from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought, wasthe ideal place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and pickedout spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, andthe 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’clockcoach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler; meanwhile eatingmy own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark, for I did notwish Zadok’s vinous garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnityshewed signs of disappearing, but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questionsabout Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing awide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a sententious villagefashion.

Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not beenough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go backfor more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my questions had been unable tomake; and the wheezing ancient’s rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward andlisten alertly. My back was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it, and somethingor other had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, thenshewing 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 wickednesswhar the deep water starts. Gate o’ hell—sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin’-linekin tech. Ol’ Cap’n Obed done it—him that faound aout more’n was goodfer him in the Saouth Sea islands.”

“Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin’ off, millslosin’ business—even the new ones—an’ the best of our menfolks kilta-privateerin’ in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an’ theRanger snow—both of ‘em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat—brigantineColumby, brig Hetty, an’ barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only oneas kep’ on with the East-Injy an’ Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin’s barkentineMalay Pride 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 thefolks stupid fer goin’ to Christian meetin’ an’ bearin’ their burdensmeek an’ lowly. Says they’d orter git better gods like some o’ the folks inthe 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 agin’folks’s doin’ any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Otaheitéwhar they was a lot o’ stone ruins older’n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o’like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carvin’s of faces that looked like thebig statues on Easter Island. They was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they wasother ruins with diff’rent carvin’s—ruins all wore away like they’dben 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 theycud ketch, an’ sported bracelets an’ armlets an’ head rigs made aout of aqueer kind o’ gold an’ covered with picters o’ monsters jest like the onescarved over the ruins on the little island—sorter fish-like frogs or frog-like fishesthat was drawed in all kinds o’ positions like they was human bein’s. Nobody cudgit aout o’ them whar they got all the stuff, an’ all the other natives wonderedhaow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next islands had lean pickin’s.Matt he got to wonderin’ too, an’ so did Cap’n Obed. Obed he notices, besides,that lots of the han’some young folks ud drop aout o’ sight fer good from year toyear, an’ that they wa’n’t many old folks araound. Also, he thinks some ofthe folks looks durned queer even fer Kanakys.”

“It took Obed to git the truth aout o’ them heathen. I dun’tknow 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 thestory aout o’ the old chief—Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever abelieved 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’poseyou 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 atthe terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale couldbe nothing but drunken phantasy.

“Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they’s things on this arth as mostfolks never heerd abaout—an’ wouldn’t believe ef they did hear. It seems theseKanakys was sacrificin’ heaps o’ their young men an’ maidens to some kindo’ god-things that lived under the sea, an’ gittin’ all kinds o’ favourin return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an’ it seemsthem 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 o’ cities on the sea-bottom, an’ this island was heaved up fromthar. Seems they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin’s when the island comeup sudden to the surface. That’s haow the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talkas soon as they got over bein’ skeert, an’ pieced up a bargain afore long.”

“Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had ‘em ages afore, butlost track o’ the upper world arter a time. What they done to the victims it ain’tfer 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 thesea-things twict every year—May-Eve an’ Hallowe’en—reg’lar ascud be. Also give some o’ the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed togive in return was plenty o’ 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-likejools as was comin’ to ‘em. At fust the things didn’t never go onto the mainisland, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin’ with thefolks, an’ havin’ j’int ceremonies on the big days—May-Eve an’Hallowe’en. Ye see, they was able to live both in an’ aout o’ water—whatthey call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told ‘em as haow folks from the other islandsmight wanta wipe ‘em aout ef they got wind o’ their bein’ thar, but they saysthey dun’t keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o’ humans ef theywas willin’ to bother—that is, any as didn’t hev sarten signs sech as wasused onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin’ to bother, they’dlay low when anybody visited the island.”

“When it come to matin’ with them toad-lookin’ fishes, theKanakys kind o’ balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter.Seems that human folks has got a kind o’ relation to sech water-beasts—that everythingalive 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 lookhuman at fust, but later turn more’n more like the things, till finally they’d taketo the water an’ jine the main lot o’ things daown thar. An’ this is the importantpart, young feller—them as turned into fish things an’ went into the water wouldn’tnever die. Them things never died excep’ they was kilt violent.”

“Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was allfull o’ fish blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an’ begun to shewit, 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 totake to the water; but mostly they turned aout jest the way them things said. Them as was bornmore like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the islandtill they was past seventy, though they’d usually go daown under fer trial trips aforethat. Folks as had took to the water gen’rally come back a good deal to visit, so’sa man ud often be a-talkin’ to his own five-times-great-grandfather, who’d leftthe 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 fromsnake-bite or plague or sharp gallopin’ ailments or somethin’ afore they cud taketo the water—but simply looked forrad to a kind o’ change that wa’n’ta bit horrible arter a while. They thought what they’d got was well wuth all they’dhad to give up—an’ I guess Obed kind o’ come to think the same hisself whenhe’d chewed over old Walakea’s story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the fewas hadn’t got none of the fish blood—bein’ of a royal line that intermarriedwith royal lines on other islands.”

“Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o’ rites an’ incantations ashad to do with the sea-things, an’ let him see some o’ the folks in the villageas had changed a lot from human shape. Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him seeone of the reg’lar things from right aout o’ the water. In the end he give him afunny kind o’ thingumajig made aout o’ lead or something, that he said ud bringup the fish things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest of ‘em. The ideewas to drop it daown with the right kind o’ prayers an’ sech. Walakea allaowed asthe things was scattered all over the world, so’s anybody that looked abaout cud finda nest an’ bring ’em up ef they was wanted.”

“Matt he didn’t like this business at all, an’ wanted Obedshud keep away from the island; but the Cap’n was sharp fer gain, an’ faound hecud git them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of ‘em. Thingswent on that way fer years, an’ Obed got enough o’ that gold-like stuff to makehim start the refinery in Waite’s old run-daown fullin’ mill. He didn’t dasssell the pieces like they was, fer folks ud be all the time askin’ questions. All thesame his crews ud git a piece an’ dispose of it naow and then, even though they was sworeto keep quiet; an’ he let his women-folks wear some o’ the pieces as was more human-likethan most.”

“Wal, come abaout ‘thutty-eight—when I was seven year’old—Obed he faound the island people all wiped aout between v’yages. Seems the otherislanders had got wind o’ what was goin’ on, an’ had took matters into theirown hands. S’pose they musta had, arter all, them old magic signs as the sea-things sayswas the only things they was afeard of. No tellin’ what any o’ them Kanakys willchance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins older’n thedeluge. Pious cusses, these was—they didn’t leave nothin’ standin’ oneither the main island or the little volcanic islet excep’ what parts of the ruins wastoo big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed abaout—like charms—withsomethin’ on ‘em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob’ly them wasthe Old Ones’ signs. Folks all wiped aout, no trace o’ no gold-like things, an’none o’ the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the matter. Wouldn’t even admitthey’d ever ben any people on that island.”

“That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein’ as his normal tradewas doin’ very poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarin’ dayswhat profited the master of a ship gen’lly profited the crew proportionate. Most o’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 millswa’n’t doin’ none too well.”

“Then’s the time Obed he begun a-cursin’ at the folks ferbein’ dull sheep an’ prayin’ to a Christian heaven as didn’t help ‘emnone. He told ‘em he’d knowed of 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 gita holt o’ sarten paowers as ud bring plenty o’ fish an’ quite a bit o’gold. O’ course them as sarved on the Sumatry Queen an’ seed the island knowedwhat he meant, an’ wa’n’t none too anxious to git clost to sea-things likethey’d heerd tell on, but them as didn’t know what ‘twas all abaout got kindo’ swayed by what Obed had to say, an’ begun to ast him what he cud do to set ’emon the way to the faith as ud bring ’em results.”

Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensivesilence; glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly atthe distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to lethim finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fanciedthere was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangenesses of Innsmouthand elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not fora moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the lessthe account held a hint of genuine terror, if only because it brought in references to strangejewels 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 bygoneObed himself rather than of this antique toper.

I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curioushow 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 beginningto 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 reallyforming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.

“Poor Matt—Matt he allus was agin’ it—tried to lineup the folks on his side, an’ had long talks with the preachers—no use—theyrun the Congregational parson aout o’ taown, an’ the Methodist feller quit—neverdid see Resolved Babco*ck, the Baptist parson, agin—Wrath o’ Jehovy—I was amighty little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an’ seen what I seen—Dagon an’Ashtoreth—Belial an’ Beëlzebub—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 wasclose to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on me with astonishingalertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.

“Dun’t believe me, hey? Heh, heh, heh—then jest tell me,young feller, why Cap’n Obed an’ twenty odd other folks used to row aout to DevilReef in the dead o’ night an’ chant things so laoud ye cud hear ‘em all overtaown 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 bottomshoots daown like a cliff lower’n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that funny-shapedlead 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—fellersas used to be sailors—wear them queer robes an’ cover theirselves with them gold-likethings Obed brung? Hey?”

The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty whitebeard bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he had begun to cackle evilly.

“Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin’ to see, hey? Mebbe ye’d liketo 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 tothe reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa’s ship’s glass up tothe cupalo an’ seed the reef a-bristlin’ thick with shapes that dove off quick soon’sthe moon riz? Obed an’ the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far sideinto the deep water an’ never come up. . . . Haow’d ye like to bea little shaver alone up in a cupalo a-watchin’ shapes as wa’n’t humanshapes? . . . Hey? . . . 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 altogetherthat of mirth.

“S’pose one night ye seed somethin’ heavy heaved offen Obed’sdory beyond the reef, an’ then larned nex’ 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 theirhands . . . them as had reel hands. . . .”

“Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folkssee his three darters a-wearin’ gold-like things as nobody’d never see on ‘emafore, an’ smoke started comin’ aout o’ the refin’ry chimbly. Otherfolks were 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 Kingsportfishermen heerd abaout the ketch an’ come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobodynever see ‘em agin. An’ jest then our folks organised the Esoteric Order o’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 aouto’ sight jest then.”

“Remember, I ain’t sayin’ Obed was set on hevin’ thingsjest 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. Hewanted them gold things, an’ was willin’ to pay heavy, an’ I guess theothers 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’scraowd aout to the reef, an’ I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex’ day Obed an’thutty-two others was in gaol, with everbody a-wonderin’ jest what was afoot an’jest what charge agin’ ‘em cud be got to holt. God, ef anybody’d look’dahead . . . a couple o’ weeks later, when nothin’ had ben throwedinto the sea fer that long. . . .”

Zadok was shewing signs of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silencefor a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was comingin now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that tide, for at highwater 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 . . . swarmsof ‘em . . . all over the reef an’ swimmin’ up the harbourinto 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 thekitchen winder with his musket to find Selectman Mowry an’ see what he cud do. . . .Maounds o’ the dead an’ the dyin’ . . . shots an’ 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’ faound haff our people missin’ . . .nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an’ them things or else keep quiet . . .never heerd 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 gotto entertain guests . . . they wanted to mix like they done with theKanakys, an’ he fer 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 arter. . . .”

“Nothin’ was to be diff’runt on the aoutside, only we wasto keep shy o’ strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us. We all hed to take the Oatho’ Dagon, an’ later on they was secon’ an’ third Oaths that some onus took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards—gold an’ sech— Nouse balkin’, fer they was millions of ‘em daown thar. They’d ruther not startrisin’ an’ wipin’ aout humankind, but ef they was gave away an’ forcedto, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn’t hev them old charms to cut ‘emoff like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an’ them Kanakys wudn’t never give away theirsecrets.”

“Yield up enough sacrifices an’ savage knick-knacks an’ harbouragein the taown when they wanted it, an’ they’d let well enough alone. Wudn’tbother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside—that is, withaout they got pryin’.All in the band of the faithful—Order o’ Dagon—an’ the children shudnever die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an’ Father Dagon what we all come from onct— Iä!Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn—”

Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor oldsoul—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 moannow, and tears were coursing down his channelled cheeks 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’, an’ them as kilt theirselves—themas told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you’re a-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’ Dagon offen Obed, so waspertected 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-sixbegun to grow up —some of ‘em, that is. I was afeard—never did no pryin’arter that awful night, an’ never see one of— them —clost to in all mylife. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the war, an’ ef I’d a had anyguts or sense I’d a never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me thingswa’n’t so bad. That, I s’pose, was because gov’munt draft men was intaown arter ‘sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to falloff—mills an’ shops shet daown—shippin’ stopped an’ the harbourchoked up—railrud give up—but they . . . they never stoppedswimmin’ 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 washeerd in haouses as wa’n’t s’posed to hev nobody in ’em. . . .”

“Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us—s’pose you’veheerd a plenty on ‘em, seein’ what questions ye ast—stories abaout thingsthey’ve seed naow an’ then, an’ abaout that queer joolry as still comes infrom somewhars an’ ain’t quite all melted up—but nothin’ never gitsdef’nite. Nobody’ll believe nothin’. They call them gold-like things pirateloot, an’ allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren blood or is distempered or somethin’.Besides, them that lives here shoo off as many strangers as they kin, an’ encourage therest not to git very cur’ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters—hosseswuss’n mules—but when they got autos that was all right.”

“In ‘forty-six Cap’n Obed took a second wife that nobodyin the taown never see —some says he didn’t want to, but was made to by themas he’d called in—had three children by her—two as disappeared young, butone gal as looked like anybody else an’ was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got hermarried off by a trick to an Arkham feller as didn’t suspect nothin’. But nobodyaoutside’ll hev nothin’ to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runsthe refin’ry naow 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 seedaoutdoors.”

“Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can’t shet his eyes nomore, an’ is all aout o’ shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he’lltake to the water soon. Mebbe he’s tried it already—they do sometimes go daown ferlittle spells afore they go fer good. Ain’t ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on tenyear’. Dun’t know haow his poor wife kin feel—she come from Ipswich, 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,an’ the rest . . . God knows. . . .”

The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by littleit seemed to change the old man’s mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He wouldpause 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 vague apprehensiveness.Zadok now grew shriller, and seemed to be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.

“Hey, yew, why dun’t ye say somethin’? Haow’d ye liketo be livin’ in a taown like this, with everything a-rottin’ an’ a-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—Itell 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 nobodynothin’—”

“Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain’t told nobody nothin’yet, I’m a-goin’ to naow! You jest set still an’ listen to me, boy—thisis what I ain’t never told nobody. . . . I says I didn’t do no pryin’arter that night— but I faound things aout jest the same!”

“Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it’s this—itain’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—bendoin’ it fer years, an’ slackenin’ up lately. Them haouses north o’the river betwixt Water an’ Main Streets is full of ‘em—them devils an’what they brung —an’ when they git ready. . . . I say, whenthey git ready . . . ever hear tell of a shoggoth? . . .”

“Hey, d’ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be–Iseen ’em one night when . . . EH—AHHHH—AH! E’YAAHHHH. . . .”

The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man’s shriekalmost made me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were positively startingfrom his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dugmonstrously into my shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to look at whateverhe had glimpsed.

There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps oneset 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 eyelidsand mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back—albeit as a trembling whisper.

“Git aout o’ here! Git aout o’ here! They seenus —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 loosening masonry of the bygone wharf,and changed the mad ancient’s whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream.

“E—YAAHHHH! . . . YHAAAAAAA! . . .”

Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my shoulderand 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 reachedWater 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—anepisode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me forit, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the storywas, old Zadok’s insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrestwhich 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 had grown perilously late—my watchsaid 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight—so I tried to give my thoughtsas neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the desertedstreets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise andwould find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepitchimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder nowand 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 fellowSargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewingat every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in ahalf-hour.

Studying the grocery youth’s map and seeking a route I had not traversedbefore, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the cornerof Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reachedthe Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the GilmanHouse. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimedmy valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengerson 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—thesame men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning—shambled to the sidewalkand exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was notEnglish. I boarded the empty coach and took the same seat I had taken before, but was hardlysettled before Sargent reappeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with theengine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete thejourney to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any otherway 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 forme, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreadingthe fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reënteredthe hotel lobby; where the sullen, queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 onnext 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 upthree creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. Myroom, a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy courtyardotherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretchingroofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom—a discouragingrelique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooden panellingaround all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for adinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesomeloafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunnedbefore; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench withunbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was of the counter type,and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl ofvegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless roomat the Gilman; getting an evening paper and a flyspecked magazine from the evil-visaged clerkat 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 advisableto keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities ofthis ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I hadheard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep theimage 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 Newburyportticket-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 myconscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts fromdisturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustinessblended hideously with the town’s general fishy odour and persistently focussed one’sfancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of myroom. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. Nodoubt it had become out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In mynervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes-press which seemed to be ofthe same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relieffrom the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place withthe aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screw-driver which I kept on my key-ring.The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmlyupon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of securitywas welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doorsto connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie downwith only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flashlight from my valise, I placedit 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 thatI was really unconsciously listening for something—listening for something which I dreadedbut could not name. That inspector’s story must have worked on my imagination more deeplythan 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 asif with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were novoices, 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 somequeer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those innswhere travellers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Orwere the townsfolk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, withits frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavourable notice? It occurred to me that I must bein a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion—butI regretted none the less that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I boltedthe newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, unevenbed—coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemedmagnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put outthe 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 unmistakablesound which seemed like a malign fulfilment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadowof a doubt, the lock on my hall door was being tried—cautiously, furtively, tentatively—witha key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps lessrather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definitereason, 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 premonitionto 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 allI 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 northentered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. Thebolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a momentthere 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 timethe creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realisedthe 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 havebeen 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, butonly to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of thathotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs andlobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light thebulb 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 ponderingwith my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thoughtI could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that thedeeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakingsbore so little resemblance to recognised human speech. Then I thought with renewed force ofwhat 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 andtiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state’s safety regulationsthere was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded onlya sheer three-story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancientbrick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumpingdistance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would haveto be in a room two doors from my own—in one case on the north and in the other case onthe south—and my mind instantly set to work calculating what chances I had of making thetransfer.

I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footstepswould 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 connectingdoors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulderas a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owingto 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 hostileforces became coördinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. Myown outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it—little by little, in orderto make a minimum of sound.

I perceived that my chances were very slender, and was fully prepared for anycalamity. Even getting to another roof would not solve the problem, for there would then remainthe task of reaching the ground and escaping from the town. One thing in my favour was the desertedand ruinous state of the abutting buildings, and the number of skylights gaping blackly openin each row.

Gathering from the grocery boy’s map that the best route out of townwas southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It wasdesigned to open in my direction, hence I saw—after drawing the bolt and finding otherfastenings in place—it was not a favourable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning itas a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be madeon it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this—thougha test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side—I knew must be my route. IfI could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the groundlevel, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite buildings toWashington 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 Squareregion. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open allnight.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decayingroofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the blackgash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clingingbarnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off througha flat, marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the leftthe creek-threaded countryside was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in themoonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham whichI 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 hadgiven place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewedthrough my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffledsounds 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. Thenthe knocking was repeated—continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the timefor action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myselffor the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume wouldcover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at thethin panelling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even morethan I had expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer doorincreased.

Finally the connecting door gave, but with such a crash that I knew those outsidemust have heard. Instantly the outside knocking became a violent battering, while keys soundedominously in the hall doors of the rooms on both sides of me. Rushing through the newly openedconnexion, I succeeded in bolting the northerly hall door before the lock could be turned; buteven as I did so I heard the hall door of the third room—the one from whose window I hadhoped to reach the roof below—being tried with a pass-key.

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber withno window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and investedwith a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by theintruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisteddespite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion ofpushing at it in an effort to get through and—granting that fastenings might be as providentiallyintact as in this second room—bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turnedfrom outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve—for the connecting door beforeme was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was through, and had my right kneeand shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the openeroff guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt asI had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two otherdoors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with thebedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massingin 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 thinkabout checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt theopen connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side—pushing a bedstead againstthe one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. Imust, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window andon the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was somethingapart from the immediate weakness of my defences. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers,despite some hideous pantings, gruntings, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was utteringan unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.

As I moved the furniture and rushed toward the windows I heard a frightfulscurrying along the corridor toward the room north of me, and perceived that the southward batteringhad ceased. Plainly, most of my opponents were about to concentrate against the feeble connectingdoor which they knew must open directly on me. Outside, the moon played on the ridgepole ofthe block below, and I saw that the jump would be desperately hazardous because of the steepsurface on which I must land.

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows asmy avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearestskylight. 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 thatthe weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderousobject into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had atleast a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it wasflanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that therewas a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoidingthe dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quicklyhooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy foldsreached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bearmy weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behindme 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 gainingthe gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed itwas still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominouslyblazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church whichI recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hopedthere would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocketlamp 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 boxesand barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions andmade 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 raceddown past a barn-like second story to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and onlyechoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall, at one end of which I sawa faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, Ifound the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestonesof the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about withoutusing the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, andI thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street sideI perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway insidewas black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovablyshut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stoppedshort when close to the doorway.

For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapeswas pouring—lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanginglow cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realised tomy relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horrorthrough my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gaitwas 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 figuresspread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress fromthis building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could standit without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and cameupon 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 carefullyclosing the aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing norany light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hearthe sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not soundquite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear tome, and I was glad that all the street-lights were turned off, as is often the custom on stronglymoonlit nights in unprosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet Iretained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserteddoorways 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 anddishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chanceof passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer. At Bates Street I drew intoa yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my wayagain and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at theintersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me onthe grocery youth’s map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was nouse trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrousvisibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitatingthe typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one—orat least no pursuer of mine—would be there.

Just how fully the pursuit was organised—and indeed, just what its purposemight be—I could form no idea. There seemed to be unusual activity in the town, but Ijudged that the news of my escape from the Gilman had not yet spread. I would, of course, soonhave to shift from Washington to some other southward street; for that party from the hotelwould doubtless be after me. I must have left dust prints in that last old building, revealinghow I had gained the street.

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remainsof a park-like, iron-railed green in its centre. Fortunately no one was about, though a curioussort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street wasvery wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a longview out at sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in thebright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had beenspied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sightof the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street’s end. Far out beyond thebreakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinkingof all the hideous legends I had heard in the last thirty-four hours—legends which portrayedthis 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 distantreef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rationalproportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious cautionand half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the loftycupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogousthough differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh how plainly visible I was, I resumedmy brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominousreef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceedingmeant, 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 aroundthe 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—theimpression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and set me running frantically southwardpast 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 farfrom 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 bobbingheads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciouslyformulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I beganto hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and gutturalsounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans wereutterly changed—for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearlyfind another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting howlucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallelstreet.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down anotherstreet, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but wassimply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roadsleading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the denizens could not have known whatroute I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country awayfrom any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of allthe surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled—both from sheer hopelessness andfrom 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 edgeof the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; sinceits brier-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for afugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window, and knew about how it lay. Mostof its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places inthe town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At anyrate, 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 groceryboy’s map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancientrailway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street, then west to Lafayette—thereedging around but not crossing an open space hom*ologous to the one I had traversed—andsubsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adams,and Bank Streets—the latter skirting the river-gorge—to the abandoned and dilapidatedstation I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neitherto re-cross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broadas South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order toedge 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 whichI had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dog-trot, trusting toluck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarmthat one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but therewere 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 doorwayas the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolateunder the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I beganto detect a fresh distribution of the vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from coverbeheld a motor-car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which thereintersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched—choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a shortabatement—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 anextension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one worea peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so oddthat 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 aroundthe corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the partybe still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds faroff toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread wasin re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street—with its seaward view—and I had tonerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglerscould not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had betterslacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouthnative.

When the view of the water again opened out—this time on my right—Iwas half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not, however, resist; but cast a sidelongglance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There wasno ship visible, as I had half expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caughtmy 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 especiallyrepellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I couldsee a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour whichI could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed thetall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled fora 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 advancingalong Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my firstdisquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away—andwas horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the dog-like sub-humanness of theircrouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touchingthe ground; while another figure—robed and tiaraed—seemed to progress in an almosthopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman’s courtyard—theone, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my directionI 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 deceivedthem, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course—meanwhilecroaking 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 decrepithouses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I roundedthe 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 receiveda shock 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 warehousesin safety.

No one was stirring in that dead street beside the river-gorge, and the roarof the waterfalls quite drowned my footsteps. It was a long dog-trot to the ruined station,and the great brick warehouse walls around me seemed somehow more terrifying than the frontsof private houses. At last I saw the ancient arcaded station—or what was left of it—andmade directly for the tracks that started from its farther end.

The rails were rusty but mainly intact, and not more than half the ties hadrotted away. Walking or running on such a surface was very difficult; but I did my best, andon the whole made very fair time. For some distance the line kept on along the gorge’sbrink, but at length I reached the long covered bridge where it crossed the chasm at a dizzyheight. The condition of this bridge would determine my next step. If humanly possible, I woulduse it; if not, I would have to risk more street wandering and take the nearest intact highwaybridge.

The vast, barn-like 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 myflashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About halfway across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; butin 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 increasinglyrural and with less and less of Innsmouth’s abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growthof weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore my clothes, but I was none the less glad thatthey were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must bevisible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very shortly, with the single track on a low, grassyembankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higherground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. Iwas very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortablynear according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerveoff to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfullycertain that the railway itself was not patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancientspires 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, asmy gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held meimmobile for a second.

What I saw—or fancied I saw—was a disturbing suggestion of undulantmotion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must bepouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great, and I could distinguishnothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated toomuch, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestionof sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way—a suggestion of bestial scrapingand 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 veryextreme 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 strangelylarge for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.

Whence could come the dense personnel of such a column as I now beheld? Didthose ancient, unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted, uncatalogued, and unsuspected life? Orhad some unseen ship indeed landed a legion of unknown outsiders on that hellish reef? Who werethey? Why were they there? And if such a column of them was scouring the Ipswich road, wouldthe patrols on the other roads be likewise augmented?

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pacewhen 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 beganto 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 imagesof the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating columnon the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering andgrateful for the cut’s protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drewso close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming alongthat road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaventhese creatures employed no dogs for tracking—though perhaps that would have been impossibleamidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonablysafe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not muchmore than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by amalign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the closemoonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollutionof that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types—something one wouldnot care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel ofcroaking, baying, and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeedthe voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the loweranimals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous—I could not look upon thedegenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sounds receded towardthe west. The horde was very close now—the air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and theground 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 actualityor 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 repeatedunder the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places havestrange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one humanimagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumblingsteeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depthsof that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the taleof old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to makeas to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible thateven my latest fear is sheer delusion?

But I must try to tell what I thought I saw that night under the mocking yellowmoon—saw surging and hopping down the Rowley road in plain sight in front of me as I crouchedamong the wild brambles of that desolate railway cut. Of course my resolution to keep my eyesshut had failed. It was foredoomed to failure—for who could crouch blindly while a legionof croaking, baying entities of unknown source flopped noisomely past, scarcely more than ahundred yards away?

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been preparedconsidering what I had seen before. My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal—soshould I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to lookupon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes untilthe raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a longsection of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the roadcrossed the track—and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror thatleering 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 humanmind. Nothing that I could have imagined—nothing, even, that I could have gathered hadI credited old Zadok’s crazy tale in the most literal way—would be in any way comparableto the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw—or believe I saw. I have tried to hintwhat it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible thatthis planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objectiveflesh, 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—surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant sarabandof 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 ghoulishlyhumped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man’s felt hat perched on the shapelessthing that answered for a head. . . .

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had whitebellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Theirforms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigiousbulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and theirlong 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, clearlyused for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faceslacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew toowell what they must be—for was not the memory of that evil tiara at Newburyport stillfresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design—living and horrible—andas I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basem*nt hadso fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitlessswarms 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 hadever had.

V.

It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me from my stupor in the brush-grownrailway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any prints in thefresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone. Innsmouth’s ruined roofs and toppling steeplesloomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all the desolatesalt 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, butI felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth—andaccordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness, hunger,horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a long time able to walk; so started slowly along themuddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was in the village, getting a meal and providing myselfwith presentable clothes. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day talked long andearnestly with government officials there; a process I later repeated in Boston. With the mainresult of these colloquies the public is now familiar—and I wish, for normality’ssake, there were nothing more to tell. Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me—yetperhaps a greater horror—or a greater marvel—is reaching out.

As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of therest of my tour—the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had countedso heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewellery said to be in the MiskatonicUniversity Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham by collecting some genealogicalnotes I had long wished to possess; very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of gooduse later on when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historicalsociety there—Mr. E. Lapham Peabody—was very courteous about assisting me, and expressedunusual interest when I told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867and 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 ona 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 ofthe Essex County Marshes—but her education had been in France and she knew very littleof her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and her Frenchgoverness; but that guardian’s name was unfamiliar to Arkham people, and in time he droppedout of sight, so that the governess assumed his role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman—nowlong dead—was very taciturn, and there were those who said she could have told more thanshe did.

But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recordedparents of the young woman—Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh—among the known familiesof New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence—shecertainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, whichtook place at the birth of my grandmother—her only child. Having formed some disagreeableimpressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the news that it belonged onmy own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr. Peabody’s suggestion that I had the trueMarsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and tookcopious 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 Maumeerecuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and from thentill the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities—reminded of thebygone terror only by occasional official visits from government men in connexion with the campaignwhich my pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July—just a year after theInnsmouth experience—I spent a week with my late mother’s family in Cleveland; checkingsome of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom materialin existence there, and seeing what kind of connected chart I could construct.

I did not exactly relish the task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson homehad always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never encouragedmy visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he came toToledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I donot think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that shehad wandered off in grief after the suicide of my uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shothimself after a trip to New England—the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to berecalled at the Arkham Historical Society.

This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something aboutthe 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 poorlittle cousin Lawrence—Walter’s son—had been an almost perfect duplicate ofhis grandmother before his condition took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium atCanton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mentaland physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his mother’sdeath 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 toget my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were suppliedin 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 beganto acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and uncle Douglashad always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces witha measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understandthe change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on myunconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicionof it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it hadnot 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 downtownsafe-deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was onebox of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle wasalmost 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 lookingat them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother’s Frenchgoverness had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe towear them in Europe.

As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me notto be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologistswho had seen them pronounced the workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, thoughno 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 certainfigures of almost unbearable extravagance.

During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my facemust have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrappingto 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 Ithought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. WhatI did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a yearbefore.

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 beena Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham—and did not old Zadok say thatthe daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through a trick?What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the likeness 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 allmadness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailorby the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed facesof my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part—sheer fancy, bolsteredup by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my unclekilled 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 deeplyas possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparseand insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Greatwatery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos andlabyrinths of weedy Cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the othershapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during thedreams 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 eachmorning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it down. Somefrightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesomelife into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. Myhealth and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my positionand adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in itsgrip, 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 slowravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler andmore puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking atme curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was comingto 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 coralsand 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 neverdied. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realmwhose wonders—destined for him as well—he had spurned with a smoking pistol. Thiswas to be my realm, too—I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live withthose 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’yihad lived in Y’ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y’ha-nthleiwas 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 OldOnes 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 thanInnsmouth 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 apenance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth forthe first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirrordefinitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.

So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automaticand 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 dostrange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believeI need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shutme up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendoursawait me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä!Iä! No, I shall not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot myself!

I shall plan my cousin’s escape from that Canton madhouse, and togetherwe shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the seaand dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’ha-nthlei, and inthat lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.

Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreamsWalter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of theancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestledwith figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growingsensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantelclock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirringof the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creakingof 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 fearlest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noiseswhich he suspected were lurking behind them.

He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clusteringgambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King’s men in thedark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memorythan the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which hadlikewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was everable to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fangedfurry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explainthe 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 andquantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, andtries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints ofthe Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be whollyfree from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered collegein 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 atMiskatonic 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 thatwere kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautionscame late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomiconof Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed UnaussprechlichenKulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space andthe linkage of dimensions known and unknown.

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

Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill onlearning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushedArkham 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, aboutthe childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the oldhouse’s attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothedthing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in theblack 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 couldnot have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building wheresome circ*mstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth centuryan 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 everyaccessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern atticroom where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first—forno one had ever been willing to stay there long—but the Polish landlord had grown waryabout 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 creptinto his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch’s incantations rewardedhis constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smellinglanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly throughnarrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was afaint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not—atleast 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 singularangles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscureand immemorial.

Gilman’s room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the northwall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slantedgently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of otherstopped-up ones, there was no access—nor any appearance of a former avenue of access—tothe space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on thehouse’s north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boardedup at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling—which must have had a slanting floor—waslikewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above therest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancientplanking 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 closedspaces.

As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of hisroom increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemedto offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellentreasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles thatshe claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interestgradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appearedthat the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already 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 hypnoticeffect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intentlyat the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this periodhis inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensionsabout the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcelyless annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there wasthat constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyondlife—trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the ratsin the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtivebut deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort ofdry rattling—and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceilingGilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descendingto engulf him utterly.

The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that theymust be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinkingtoo much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensionswe know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason—guided by some influence pastall conjecture—had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county recordscontaining her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyondhuman experience—and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which servedas her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.

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

Gilman’s dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abyssesof inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material andgravitational 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 motionpartly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sightof his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective;but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmutedand obliquely projected—though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normalproportions and properties.

The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angledmasses 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, thoughhe could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the laterdreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared tobe divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-patternand basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly lessillogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.

All the objects—organic and inorganic alike—were totally beyonddescription or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms,labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struckhim variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesquesroused 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 felta 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—thetendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totallywith equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysseswas past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vaguevisual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constantsense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or anotherof 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 assailedhim just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fightingto keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewingin 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 overthe sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face—butmercifully, 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, whateverit might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed afresh hole—in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragmentof bone.

Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not passthe 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 hopeof making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh elemententered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to becompanioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. Thisaddition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was likean ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near theabandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare ofthe beldame had set him almost shivering—especially the first time, when an overgrownrat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationallyof Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordereddreams.

That the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; buttraces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone wasresponsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free fromthe monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent 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 theold woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third beingof greater potency.

Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though otherstudies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannianequations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and otherproblems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion ofpossible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contactbetween our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars orthe trans-galactic gulfs themselves—or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivablecosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman’s handling of thistheme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations causedan increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. Whatmade the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might—given mathematicalknowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement—step deliberately fromthe earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific pointsin the cosmic pattern.

Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out ofthe three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphereat another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished withoutloss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional spacecould probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would dependupon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens ofsome 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 mustbe vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zonesof space.

It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm couldsurvive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplieddimensions—be they within or outside the given space-time continuum—and that theconverse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairlycertain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane tothe next higher plane 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 hazinesshere was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especiallyliked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical loretransmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity—human or pre-human—whose knowledgeof the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.

Around the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow feverdid 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 certainhours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearingthe 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 coulddevelop 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-scratchings came from the blackvoids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitiveears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimesthe illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.

However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at nighthis room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assuredby Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid andunpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differentialequation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlockeddoor after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly andthought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, hadGilman 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 reportsof his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridorto see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there wasno possible foothold outside the narrow window.

As April advanced Gilman’s fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by thewhining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the groundfloor. 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 silvercrucifix—given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus’ Church—couldbring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches’ Sabbath was drawing near. May-Evewas Walpurgis-Night, when hell’s blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves ofSatan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even thoughthe fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothingabout it. There would be bad doings—and a child or two would probably be missing. Joeknew 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 andBrown Jenkin had not been near Joe’s room, nor near Paul Choynski’s room, nor anywhereelse—and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.

Gilman dropped in at a doctor’s office on the 16th of the month, andwas surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questionedhim sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had notconsulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activitiesbefore, would have made him take a rest—an impossible thing now that he was so close togreat results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universeand 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 strangeconfidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheetshe covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above wereunnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuadinghim to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did hego sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a whileseemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylightand full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps tothe cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it correspondedto 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 preliminaryphase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one whohad 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 wasone of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voicethat persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throneof Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his ownblood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings hadgone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throneof 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 downwardslant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling thanto 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 glistenedshockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck moreand more in Gilman’s head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronouncedthe words “Azathoth” and “Nyarlathotep”.

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

During the night of April 19-20 the new development occurred. Gilmanwas half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the smallpolyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edgesof some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss andstanding tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefootedand in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift hisfeet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and heshrank 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 womanand the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her armsin a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoidfore paw 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’sarms and the direction of the small monstrosity’s paw, and before he had shuffled threesteps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he felldizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritchold 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 couldnot help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of hisunseeing 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 cityhe found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria inChurch 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 wasa connexion with his somnambulism—but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbidspell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolutionhe headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the timehe had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutchedat the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancientstanding stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.

Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on thatdesolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinisteraspect 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 beganto turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town’slabyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous andinvincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.

The southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution couldGilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent andaimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o’clock his sharpened earscaught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seizedhis hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pullcarry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’sBrook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changingto an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source ofthe pull lay.

It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him andwas calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knewthat he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning ithad been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly southbut wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? Howlong would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back tothe sinister old house.

Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctantto whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebratingthe night before—it was Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—and had come home aftermidnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman’swindow was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentlemanabout that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah’s witch light which playednear 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 werehaunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thoughtthey saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman’sroom, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentlemanto 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. Heknew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mentionof a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of thissort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharperdreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful secondperson could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellowgot 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 tellhim something, though he hated to ask.

Fever—wild dreams—somnambulism—illusions of sounds—apull toward a point in the sky—and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stopstudying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second storyhe paused at Elwood’s door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continuedup to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest,but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and halfimagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slantingceiling.

That night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightenedintensity, and the old witch and small furry thing—getting closer than ever before—mockedhim with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaringtwilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopicl*ttle polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planesof a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him—a shift which ended in a flashof delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madlyand inextricably blended.

He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundlessjungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poisedon pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness—some of stone and some ofmetal—which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromaticsky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and ata different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind himtiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched awayto the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.

The pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polishedstone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struckhim 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 wereranged 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 couldnot be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture.They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-likefrom a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of thebarrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly taperingarms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish—nearly horizontal, but curving slightlyaway from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing withso delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. Thefigures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximumdiameter 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, Cyclopeancity almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faintmusical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and hewished 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 lustrousbalustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steadyhim slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spikyfigure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his otherhand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.

But now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked backacross the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were fivefigures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The otherthree 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-likewriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.

Gilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smartingsensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantichaste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He didnot 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 evengreater 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, sowent over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chainedto an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.

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

About nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house.Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garretchamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electriclight that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belongthere, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side—for it could not standup alone—was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off thefantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiatingarms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreadingfrom those knobs—all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kindof iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewildermentthat one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachmentto 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 spikything and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski’s quarters. The whining prayersof the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman didnot mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen thatthing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tinthing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowskicalled her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman’sbed—on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the younggentleman had lots of queer things in his room—books and curios and pictures and markingson paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.

So Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he waseither still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him todepredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeingit in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatchedit in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next dayhe 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 upstairsand across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed—with afrank admission as to its purpose—from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood’sdoor on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thingon 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 disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was gettingvery 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 thingcame again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actuallyreached him, and he felt the crone’s withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled outof bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilightamorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, forpresently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to apeak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on thatfloor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in thecentre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shapeand nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thoughthe saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floorfell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second’s dryrattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and beardedhuman face.

The evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stooda figure he had never seen before—a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but withoutthe slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing ashis only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishablebecause of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking wheneverhe changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regularfeatures. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, whilethe beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman’s right hand. Over everything was a pallof intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer’sclothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wristjust below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.

He awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and sawthat his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scenewith the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him ashe slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that theflour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellowwho roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But somethingwould have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again hetried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemedof about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of somehorrible noise heard in dreams.

As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed afterthe scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. Thatscene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack hisimagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestionsof the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them—abyssesin which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeriesand the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wispsof milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else hadgone on ahead—a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximationsof form—and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but ratheralong the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to thephysics 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 ofan unseen flute—but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conceptionfrom what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rulesall time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.

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

He took the spiky image down to Elwood’s room, steeling himself againstthe whines of the loomfixer 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 forbreakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams andfears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shockedby his guest’s drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburnwhich 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 imagecould be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking toMazurewicz 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 both shodand unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peerthrough Gilman’s keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsedthat light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too—and ashe 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 walkingand talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the otherhand. 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. Thesesimple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As fora plan of action—Gilman had better move down to Elwood’s room and avoid sleepingalone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Verysoon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to thevarious museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had beenfound in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats inthe 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. Duringa free period he shewed 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 acouch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first timein weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and thewhines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.

During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbidmanifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhilethe landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk amongthe superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was alwaystrying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessedby the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say—in fact, he insistedthat cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nightsof Gilman’s absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and onthe stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowskivowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reportscould mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on hishost’s dresser.

For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort toidentify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interestwas 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, and the resultis still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and telluriumin the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of highatomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail tocorrespond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved forprobable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though theimage is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.

On the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilmanwas 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 latethat night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone—especiallysince he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose imagehad become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had beennear her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The cronehad 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 logswhen night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had socompletely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancientmagic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwoodagreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strangeand significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guardedand handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossiblethat Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasisesthe uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; and who can say whatunderlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?

Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical researchalone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkablesituations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessibledimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not existin certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one’slife and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slightamounts 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 historyas young as before.

Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture withany degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attemptsat crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings andmessengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hiddenand 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 orintermediaries—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 Mazurewiczreel 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 scratchingand gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Thenhe 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 morbiditytittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch acrossthe room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous croneseized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitudeof the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he wasin a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses toweringup on every hand.

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

The youth’s oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presentlythe beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreameras if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, brokethe spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase andinto the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousnessdeparted he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.

On the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instanthe opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret roomwith 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-bottomswere brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knewat least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber tohear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extendall the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; forin addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—suchas the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be dividedinto halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and backinto it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to thedoor and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideousdream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chantingmournfully two floors below.

Descending to Elwood’s room he roused his still-sleeping host and begantelling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really havehappened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks inthe 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 ifhe had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not evenapproximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard aterrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairsafter 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 forArkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had givenhim. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house—especiallya thin, childish wail hastily choked off.

Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable tofix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, andhe seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the UniversitySpa, 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 hischeck 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 completelyvanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasonsshe 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 itsgrimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbaton Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try toprotect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believedsuch things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. Andher friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.

But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair ofrevellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admittedthey had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively enteringthe 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, whilearound 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 meanwhileseen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he camehome. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in aroundthem. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrousand unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert stillmore direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, whenall the papers were full of this kidnapping business.

Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment bothGilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciouslysucceeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slippedoutside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had hebeen on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—theblistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—theblack man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—thebubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—theunexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of thesuperstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanityapply to such a case?

There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cutclasses and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-timewhich all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at sixo’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would beheld in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerlyvoid of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look therefor the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insistedthat the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and droppedit inside his shirt to humour the fellow.

Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmicalpraying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturallysharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in theancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the BlackBook welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackestceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.

Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant ofthe 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 whichwould follow the black co*ck and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and triedto 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. Overmiles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The firesmust be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? Whatwas it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—BrownJenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall nearhis couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came anothersound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lightswould not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursedlittle face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—andheard the faint fumbling at the door.

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

But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-littenpeaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, thequeer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—aninfant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leeringold woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportionedpale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles inher 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 clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend theempty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forwardand took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same momentthe disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulfon his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raisedthe 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 witchcroaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mentaland emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downwardmotion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-likeclangour 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 tableand wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brinkof the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for thosemurderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled facewas 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 inhis 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 relaxedlong enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws fromhis neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws receiveda fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, andhis own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doinghe had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightenedit 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 overthe 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 reston the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight whichnearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tinyhands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his effortshad been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, theyellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on thefloor stood full beside the small lifeless body.

In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of theSabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memoriesmixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angleswhich he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the firsttime. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether hecould 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—anabnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relationbetwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.

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

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

They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long beforedawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewiczat once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and withopen, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderoushands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, andJoe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new formhis 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 squealingand whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.

When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sentfor Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might proveembarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax insomething like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at timesand whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at itsvery start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.

Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—wasnow stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums wereruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception orendurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing allthe Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.

Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communicationwas maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it wouldbe better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they mustleave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spokeof 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. Nobodyhad been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In anothercolumn 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, andwas 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 partitions all the evening, but paid little attention tothem. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwoodjumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant wasemitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description.He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.

Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhingsubsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodgerwere all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone forDr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneaththe ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. Whenthe 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. Therehad been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski,frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of hislease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient housein Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the broodingloomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral andterrible things.

It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimsonrat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were veryindistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and thebase-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no oneelse could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks onthe flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski andDesrochers 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 ofits final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputationand because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked afterall, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officialstraced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed thatthe number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth theirwhile to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, andthe locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vaguelocal tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass.The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formedan additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitationby the building inspector.

Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circ*mstances have never been explained.Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to collegethe next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the townmuch diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostlytittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—nofresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’sdeath. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certainevents abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about thematter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but eventhat 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 WitchHouse, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planksand timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole atticstory was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess beforethe 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 thatthe gossip began.

Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling wereseveral things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turncalled in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badlycrushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern dateconflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, thelow, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’sphysician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixedwith shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advancedyears. 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 productiveof controversy and reflection.

Other objects found included the mingled 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 horribleforms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as thatof the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute hom*ogeneity of the crabbed,archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest agedifferences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is thevariety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship,and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diversestates of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—isa badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the collegemuseum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, andpossessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.

Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarredesigns chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stainswhen found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickelcrucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewiczas that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was draggedup to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some cornerof Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theoriestoo wild and fantastic for sober credence.

When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealedtriangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to containmuch less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though ithad a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, thefloor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but othersextending 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 ofcemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiledfright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the hauntedand 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 amongthe members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerningthis skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about thelong, brownish hairs with which it was associated.

The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristicsmore typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellowfangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrouslydegraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came uponthis blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church becauseof the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.

I was shewn into the attic chamber by a grave, intelligent-looking man with quiet clothes andan iron-grey beard, who spoke to me in this fashion:

“Yes, he lived here—but I don’t advise your doinganything. Your curiosity makes you irresponsible. We never come here at night, and it’sonly because of his will that we keep it this way. You know what he did. Thatabominable society took charge at last, and we don’t know where he is buried. Therewas 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 letthat thing on the table—the thing that looks like a match box—alone. We don’tknow what it is, but we suspect it has something to do with what he did. We even avoidlooking at it very steadily.”

After a time the man left me alone in the attic room. It was very dingy anddusty, and only primitively furnished, but it had a neatness which shewed it was not a slum-denizen’squarters. There were shelves full of theological and classical books, and another bookcase containingtreatises on magic—Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, Trithemius, Hermes Trismegistus, Borellus,and others in strange alphabets 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 floorup to which the crude, steep staircase led. The windows were of bull’s-eye pattern, andthe 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 whatto do with it, for I drew a pocket electric light—or what looked like one—out ofmy pocket and nervously tested its flashes. The light was not white but violet, and seemed lesslike true light than like some radio-active bombardment. I recall that I did not regard it asa common flashlight—indeed, I had a common flashlight in another pocket.

It was getting dark, and the ancient roofs and chimney-pots outside lookedvery queer through the bull’s-eye window-panes. Finally I summoned up courage and proppedthe small object up on the table against a book—then turned the rays of the peculiar violetlight upon it. The light seemed now to be more like a rain or hail of small violet particlesthan like a continuous beam. As the particles struck the glassy surface at the centre of thestrange device, they seemed to produce a crackling noise like the sputtering of a vacuum tubethrough which sparks are passed. The dark glassy surface displayed a pinkish glow, and a vaguewhite shape seemed to be taking form at its centre. Then I noticed that I was not alone in theroom—and put the ray-projector back in my pocket.

But the newcomer did not speak—nor did I hear any sound whatever duringall the immediately following moments. Everything was shadowy pantomime, as if seen at a vastdistance through some intervening haze—although on the other hand the newcomer and allsubsequent comers loomed large and close, as if both near and distant, according to some abnormalgeometry.

The newcomer was a thin, dark man of medium height attired in the clericalgarb of the Anglican church. He was apparently about thirty years old, with a sallow, olivecomplexion and fairly good features, but an abnormally high forehead. His black hair was wellcut 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 otherclergymen I had seen, but he had a vastly higher forehead, and was darker and more intelligent-looking—alsomore subtly and concealedly evil- looking. At the present moment—having just lighteda faint oil lamp—he looked nervous, and before I knew it he was casting all his magicalbooks into a fireplace on the window side of the room (where the wall slanted sharply) whichI had not noticed before. The flames devoured the volumes greedily—leaping up in strangecolours and emitting indescribably hideous odours as the strangely hieroglyphed leaves and wormybindings succumbed to the devastating element. All at once I saw there were others in the room—grave-lookingmen in clerical costume, one of whom wore the bands and knee-breeches of a bishop. Though Icould 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 triedto grip the back of a chair. The bishop pointed to the empty case and to the fireplace (wherethe flames had died down amidst a charred, non-committal mass), and seemed filled with a peculiarloathing. The first-comer then gave a wry smile and reached out with his left hand toward thesmall object on the table. Everyone then seemed frightened. The procession of clerics beganfiling down the steep stairs through the trap-door in the floor, turning and making menacinggestures 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 extracteda coil of rope. Mounting a chair, he attached one end of the rope to a hook in the great exposedcentral beam of black oak, and began making a noose with the other end. Realising he was aboutto 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 steppeddown 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 asa weapon of defence. Why I thought it could help me, I do not know. I turned it on—fullin 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—whichdid not, however, wholly displace the exultation. He stopped in his tracks—then, flailinghis arms wildly in the air, began to stagger backward. I saw he was edging toward the open stair-wellin the floor, and tried to shout a warning, but he did not hear me. In another instant he hadlurched backward through the opening and was lost to view.

I found difficulty in moving toward the stair-well, but when I did get thereI found no crushed body on the floor below. Instead there was a clatter of people coming upwith lanterns, for the spell of phantasmal silence had broken, and I once more heard soundsand 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 (simply villagers, apparently)farthest in the lead saw me—and stood paralysed. One of them shrieked loudly and reverberently:

Then they all turned and fled frantically. All, that is, but one. When thecrowd was gone I saw the grave-bearded man who had brought me to this place—standing alonewith a lantern. He was gazing at me gaspingly and fascinatedly, but did not seem afraid. Thenhe 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 whathas happened. It happened once before, but the man got frightened and shot himself. You oughtnot to have made him come back. You know what he wants. But you mustn’tget frightened like the other man he got. Something very strange and terrible has happened toyou, but it didn’t get far enough to hurt your mind and personality. If you’ll keepcool, and accept the need for making certain radical readjustments in your life, you can keepright on enjoying the world, and the fruits of your scholarship. But you can’t live here—andI 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 canbe put back now. It would only make matters worse to do—or summon—anything. Youare 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 beena certain change—in your personal appearance. He always causes that. But in a newcountry you can get used to it. There’s a mirror up at the other end of the room, andI’m going to take you to it. You’ll get a shock—though you will see nothingrepulsive.”

I was now shaking with a deadly fear, and the bearded man almost had to holdme up as he walked me across the room to the mirror, the faint lamp (i.e., that formerly onthe table, not the still fainter lantern he had brought) in his free hand. This is what I sawin the glass:

A thin, dark man of medium stature attired in the clerical garb of the Anglicanchurch, apparently about thirty, and with rimless, steel-bowed glasses glistening beneath asallow, 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!

(Dedicated to Robert Bloch)

Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killedby lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge. It istrue that the window he faced was unbroken, but Nature has shewn herself capable of many freakishperformances. The expression on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular sourceunrelated to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantasticimagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered.As for the anomalous conditions at the deserted church on Federal Hill—the shrewd analystis not slow in attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at leastsome of which Blake was secretly connected.

For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the fieldof myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of abizarre, spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city—a visit to a strange old man as deeplygiven to occult and forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst death and flame, and it musthave been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his home in Milwaukee. He may have knownof the old stories despite his statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may havenipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.

Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence, thereremain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They are inclined to takemuch of Blake’s diary at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts suchas the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified existence of the dislikedand unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to 1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitivereporter 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 believerswho, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangelyadorned metal box found in the old church steeple—the black windowless steeple, and notthe tower where Blake’s diary said those things originally were. Though widely censuredboth officially and unofficially, this man—a reputable physician with a taste for oddfolklore—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. Thepapers have given the tangible details from a sceptical angle, leaving for others the drawingof 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 summarise the darkchain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief actor.

Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934-5, taking theupper floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off College Street—on the crestof 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 wherehuge, friendly cats sunned themselves atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house hada monitor roof, classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the other earmarksof 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 stepsbelow the general level.

Blake’s study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front gardenon one side, while its west windows—before one of which he had his desk—faced offfrom the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town’s outspreadroofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the opencountryside’s purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral humpof 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 curioussense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanishin 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 furnituresuitable to his quarters and settled down to write and paint—living alone, and attendingto the simple housework himself. His studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of themonitor roof furnished admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five of hisbest-known short stories— “The Burrower Beneath”, “The Stairs in the Crypt”, “Shaggai”, “In the Vale of Pnath”, and “The Feasterfrom 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 outspreadwest—the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below, the Georgian court-house belfry, thelofty pinnacles of the downtown section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distancewhose unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy. From his few localacquaintances he learned that the far-off slope was a vast Italian quarter, though most of thehouses were remnants of older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his field-glasseson that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling smoke; picking out individual roofs andchimneys 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 afterthe hill had faded into the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights andthe 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 mostfascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and atsunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemedto rest on especially high ground; for the grimy facade, and the obliquely seen north side withsloping roof and the tops of great pointed windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surroundingridgepoles 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 asthe glass could shew, was that earliest experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded thestately 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 oddlymounting 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 curiousthings. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered over the place, so thateven the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky eaves. Around other towers and belfries hisglass would reveal great flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is whathe thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several friends, but noneof them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed the faintest notion of what the church wasor had been.

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

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

Now and then a battered church facade or crumbling spire came in sight, butnever the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a shopkeeper about a great stone churchthe 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 leadingeternally off to the south. He crossed two or three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpseda familiar tower. Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this timehe could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The dark man’s face had alook 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, abovethe 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. Twicehe lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or housewives who sat ontheir 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 bulkrose darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in a windswept open square, quaintlycobblestoned, with a high bank wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; forupon the wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported—a separate, lesserworld raised fully six feet above the surrounding streets—there stood a grim, titan bulkwhose identity, despite Blake’s new perspective, was beyond dispute.

The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high stonebuttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost among the brown, neglectedweeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows were largely unbroken, though many of the stonemullions were missing. Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have survived sowell, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The massive doors were intactand tightly closed. Around the top of the bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rustyiron fence whose gate—at the head of a flight of steps from the square—was visiblypadlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely overgrown. Desolation and decayhung like a pall above the place, and in the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felta touch of the dimly sinister beyond his power to define.

There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman at thenortherly 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 thatpeople never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said very hurriedly that theItalian priests warned everybody against it, vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt thereand left its mark. He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled certainsounds and rumours from his boyhood.

There had been a bad sect there in the ould days—an outlaw sect thatcalled up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken a good priest to exorcisewhat had come, though there did be those who said that merely the light could do it. If FatherO’Malley were alive there would be many the thing he could tell. But now there was nothingto do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that owned it were dead or far away. Theyhad run away like rats after the threatening talk in ’77, when people began to mind theway folks vanished now and then in the neighbourhood. Some day the city would step in and takethe property for lack of heirs, but little good would come of anybody’s touching it. Betterit be left alone for the years to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest foreverin 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 wonderedwhat grain of truth might lie behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably theywere mere legends evoked by the evil look of the place, but even so, they were like a strangecoming to life of one of his own stories.

The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed unableto light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that towered on its high plateau. Itwas 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 walland rusted fence for possible avenues of ingress. There was a terrible lure about the blackenedfane which was not to be resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but around on thenorth side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk around on the narrow copingoutside the fence till he came to the gap. If the people feared the place so wildly, he wouldencounter no interference.

He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone noticedhim. Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square edging away and making the samesign with their right hands that the shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several windows wereslammed down, and a fat woman darted into the street and pulled some small children inside arickety, unpainted house. The gap in the fence was very easy to pass through, and before longBlake found himself wading amidst the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here andthere the worn stump of a headstone told him that there had once been burials in this field;but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The sheer bulk of the church was oppressivenow that he was close to it, but he conquered his mood and approached to try the three greatdoors in the facade. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit of the Cyclopean buildingin quest of some minor and more penetrable opening. Even then he could not be sure that he wishedto enter that haunt of desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him onautomatically.

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’sfiltered rays. Debris, old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts met hiseye, though over everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all sharp outlines. The rustedremains of a hot-air furnace shewed that the building had been used and kept in shape as lateas mid-Victorian times.

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

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

The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake could scarcelydecipher 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 muchconcerning some of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore expressions distinctlyopen to criticism, while one of the windows seemed to shew merely a dark space with spiralsof curious luminosity scattered about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake noticed thatthe cobwebbed cross above the altar was not of the ordinary kind, but resembled the primordialankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt.

In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and ceiling-highshelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the first time he received a positive shockof objective horror, for the titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbiddenthings which most sane people have never even heard of, or have heard of only in furtive, timorouswhispers; the banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulae whichhave trickled down the stream of time from the days of man’s youth, and the dim, fabulousdays before man was. He had himself read many of them—a Latin version of the abhorredNecronomicon, the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous Cultes des Goulesof Comte d’Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn’shellish De Vermis Mysteriis. But there were others he had known merely by reputationor not at all—the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of Dzyan, and a crumbling volumein wholly unidentifiable characters yet with certain symbols and diagrams shudderingly recognisableto the occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumours had not lied. This place had oncebeen the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe.

In the ruined desk was a small leather-bound record-book filled with entriesin some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing consisted of the common traditionalsymbols used today in astronomy and anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts—thedevices of the sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs—here massed in solid pagesof text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that each symbol answered to some alphabeticalletter.

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

Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake ploughed again throughthe dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he had seen a door and staircasepresumably leading up to the blackened tower and steeple—objects so long familiar to himat a distance. The ascent was a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders haddone their worst in this constricted place. The staircase was a spiral with high, narrow woodentreads, and now and then Blake passed a clouded window looking dizzily out over the city. Thoughhe had seen no ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of bells in the tower whose narrow,louver-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, andclearly 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 louver-boards. These hadbeen 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 some four feet inheight and two in average diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely incised, andwholly unrecognisable hieroglyphs. On this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetricalform; its hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath the decade-deepdust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical object some four inches through. Around thepillar in a rough circle were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behindthem, ranging along the dark-panelled walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling, black-paintedplaster, resembling more than anything else the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious EasterIsland. In one corner of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading upto the closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above.

As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs onthe strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to clear the dust away with hishands 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 evolvedon this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere turned out to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedronwith many irregular flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort, or an artificialobject 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 designedsupports 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 hiseyes 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 withgreat stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains and no mark of life, and still remoterspaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses told of the presence of consciousness andwill.

When he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of dust inthe 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 aboutit. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake gasped with a baffling mixtureof emotions. It was a human skeleton, and it must have been there for a very long time. Theclothing 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, astickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter’s badge with the name of the old ProvidenceTelegram, and a crumbling leather pocketbook. Blake examined the latter with care, findingwithin it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising calendar for 1893, somecards 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 thedim westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases as the following:

. . .

Restoring the paper to the pocketbook and placing the latter in his coat, Blaketurned to look down at the skeleton in the dust. The implications of the notes were clear, andthere could be no doubt but that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two years beforein quest of a newspaper sensation which no one else had been bold enough to attempt. Perhapsno 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? Blakestooped 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 vaguesuggestions of charring. This charring extended to some of the fragments of clothing. The skullwas in a very peculiar state—stained yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top asif some powerful acid had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton duringits four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not imagine.

Before he realised it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting its curiousinfluence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw processions of robed, hooded figureswhose outlines were not human, and looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reachingmonoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea, and vortices of space wherewisps of black mist floated before thin shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all elsehe glimpsed an infinite gulf of darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were known only bytheir windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force seemed to superimpose order on chaos andhold 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, indeterminatepanic fear. Blake choked and turned away from the stone, conscious of some formless alien presenceclose to him and watching him with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with something—somethingwhich was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at him—something which wouldceaselessly follow him with a cognition that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place wasgetting 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 traceof luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried to look away from it, but some obscurecompulsion drew his eyes back. Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about thething? 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 mightstill be lurking in the bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an elusive touch of foetorhad arisen somewhere close by, though its source was not apparent. Blake seized the cover ofthe long-open box and snapped it down. It moved easily on its alien hinges, and closed completelyover the unmistakably glowing stone.

At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come fromthe steeple’s eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door. Rats, without question—theonly living things to reveal their presence in this accursed pile since he had entered it. Andyet that stirring in the steeple frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly downthe spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave, into the vaulted basem*nt, out amidst the gatheringdusk of the deserted square, and down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues ofFederal Hill toward the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks of the collegedistrict.

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 feverishlyat the cryptogram in that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soonsaw, was no simple one; and after a long period of endeavour he felt sure that its languagecould not be English, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he wouldhave to draw upon the deepest wells of his strange erudition.

Every evening the old impulse to gaze westward returned, and he saw the blacksteeple as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and half-fabulous world. But nowit held a fresh note of terror for him. He knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and withthe knowledge his vision ran riot in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning, andas 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—andhe 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, andknown to him in a halting way through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent aboutwhat Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and disconcerted by his results. There are referencesto a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjecturesabout the black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding allknowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices. Some of Blake’s entries shew fear lestthe thing, which he seemed to regard as summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the street-lightsform a bulwark which cannot be crossed.

Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all timeand space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before everthe Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoidthings of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered ataeons 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 merchantsfrom 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 sleptin the ruins of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver’sspade once more brought it forth to curse mankind.

Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake’s entries, thoughin 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 thedreaded church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings and scrapingsin the dark windowless steeple, and called on their priests to banish an entity which hauntedtheir dreams. Something, they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were darkenough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing local superstitions, but failedto shed much light on the earlier background of the horror. It was obvious that the young reportersof today are no antiquarians. In writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses a curiouskind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the Shining Trapezohedron and of banishingwhat 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—pervadingeven his dreams—to visit the accursed tower and gaze again into the cosmic secrets ofthe glowing stone.

Then something in the Journal on the morning of July 17 threw the diaristinto a veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the other half-humorous items aboutthe Federal Hill restlessness, but to Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the nighta thunderstorm had put the city’s lighting-system out of commission for a full hour, andin that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with fright. Those living near the dreadedchurch 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. Toward the last it had bumped up to the tower, where there were soundsof the shattering of glass. It could go wherever the darkness reached, but light would alwayssend it fleeing.

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

But even this was not the worst. That evening in the Bulletin Blakeread 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 throughthe cellar window after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule and ofthe spectral nave ploughed up in a singular way, with bits of rotted cushions and satin pew-liningsscattered curiously around. There was a bad odour everywhere, and here and there were bits ofyellow stain and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the tower, and pausinga moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above, they found the narrow spiral stairs wipedroughly clean.

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

Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to the windowlessspire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the horizontally sliding trap-door, and shot afeeble flashlight beam into the black and strangely foetid space, he saw nothing but darkness,and an 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 somefanatic had striven to bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some ofthe 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. Threemen in succession found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very reluctantlyand returned very soon without adding to the account given by the reporters.

From this point onward Blake’s diary shews a mounting tide of insidioushorror and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for not doing something, and speculateswildly on the consequences of another electrical breakdown. It has been verified that on threeoccasions—during thunderstorms—he telephoned the electric light company in a franticvein and asked that desperate precautions against a lapse of power be taken. Now and then hisentries shew concern over the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, andthe strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower room. He assumed thatthese things had been removed—whither, and by whom or what, he could only guess. But hisworst fears concerned himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mindand that lurking horror in the distant steeple—that monstrous thing of night which hisrashness had called out of the ultimate black spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging athis will, and callers of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk andstare out of the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond the swirling smokeof the city. His entries dwell monotonously on certain terrible dreams, and of a strengtheningof the unholy rapport in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find himselffully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College Hill toward the west. Again andagain he dwells on the fact that the thing in the steeple knows where to find him.

The week following July 30 is recalled as the time of Blake’s partialbreakdown. He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone. Visitors remarked the cordshe kept near his bed, and he said that sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles everynight 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 almostblack space. All he could see were short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light, but hecould 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 answeringsound 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, whilstlater he found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built into the wall, and fumbling hisuncertain way upward toward some region of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat downagainst him. Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal images played, all of themdissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night wherein whirledsuns and worlds of an even profounder blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of UltimateChaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled byhis flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous pipingof a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws.

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

He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the narrow spiralstaircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn. There was a nightmare flight througha vast cobwebbed nave whose ghostly arches reached up to realms of leering shadow, a sightlessscramble through a littered basem*nt, a climb to regions of air and street-lights outside, anda mad racing down a spectral hill of gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall blacktowers, and up the steep eastward precipice to his own ancient door.

On regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on his studyfloor fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every inch of his body seemed sore andbruised. When he faced the mirror he saw that his hair was badly scorched, while a trace ofstrange, evil odour seemed to cling to his upper outer clothing. It was then that his nervesbroke down. Thereafter, lounging exhaustedly about in a dressing-gown, he did little but starefrom his west window, shiver at the threat of thunder, and make wild entries in his diary.

The great storm broke just before midnight on August 8th. Lightning struckrepeatedly in all parts of the city, and two remarkable fireballs were reported. The rain wastorrential, while a constant fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blakewas utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting system, and tried to telephone the companyaround 1 a.m., though by that time service had been temporarily cut off in the interest of safety.He recorded everything in his diary—the large, nervous, and often undecipherable hieroglyphstelling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and of entries scrawled blindly in thedark.

He had to keep the house dark in order to see out the window, and it appearsthat most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously through the rain across the glisteningmiles of downtown roofs at the constellation of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now andthen he would fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached phrases such as “Thelights 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 scattereddown two of the pages.

Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2:12 a.m. accordingto power-house records, but Blake’s diary gives no indication of the time. The entry ismerely, “Lights out—God help me.” On Federal Hill there were watchers as anxiousas he, and rain-soaked knots of men paraded the square and alleys around the evil church withumbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns, crucifixes, and obscure charmsof the many sorts common to southern Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made crypticalsigns of fear with their right hands when a turn in the storm caused the flashes to lessen andfinally to cease altogether. A rising wind blew out most of the candles, so that the scene grewthreateningly dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church, and he hastenedto the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables he could. Of the restless and curioussounds 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. Monahan of the Central Station, an officerof the highest reliability who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the crowd; andof most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church’s high bank wall—especiallythose in the square where the eastward facade was visible. Of course there was nothing whichcan be proved as being outside the order of Nature. The possible causes of such an event aremany. 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—spontaneouscombustion—pressure of gases born of long decay—any one of numberless phenomenamight be responsible. And then, of course, the factor of conscious charlatanry can by no meansbe excluded. The thing was really quite simple in itself, and covered less than three minutesof 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 theblack tower. There had for some time been a vague exhalation of strange, evil odours from thechurch, and this had now become emphatic and offensive. Then at last there was a sound of splinteringwood, and a large, heavy object crashed down in the yard beneath the frowning easterly facade.The tower was invisible now that the candles would not burn, but as the object neared the groundthe people knew that it was the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that tower’s east window.

Immediately afterward an utterly unbearable foetor welled forth from the unseenheights, 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-blowingwind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellasof the crowd. Nothing definite could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-lookingspectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser blackness against the inkysky—something like a formless cloud of smoke that shot with meteor-like speed toward theeast.

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 ofbelated lightning, followed by an earsplitting crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens. Halfan 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 connexion withthe general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash and deafening explosion whichfollowed the Federal Hill occurrence were even more tremendous farther east, where a burst ofthe singular foetor was likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College Hill,where the crash awaked 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 ofthe hill, or noticed the inexplicable upward rush of air which almost stripped the leaves fromthe trees and blasted the plants in the gardens. It was agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-boltmust have struck somewhere in this neighbourhood, though no trace of its striking could afterwardbe found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a grotesque and hideous massof 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 floodof intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke; whilst evidence concerning the momentaryburned odour after the stroke is equally general.

These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable connexionwith the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows lookedinto Blake’s study, noticed the blurred white face at the westward window on the morningof the 9th, and wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they saw the same face inthe same position that evening, they felt worried, and watched for the lights to come up inhis apartment. Later they rang the bell of the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman forcethe door.

The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when the intruderssaw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark, convulsive fright on the twisted features,they turned away in sickened dismay. Shortly afterward the coroner’s physician made anexamination, and despite the unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous tension inducedby 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 suchabnormal 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 inthe diary on the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last, and the broken-pointedpencil was found clutched in his spasmodically contracted right hand.

The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed, and legibleonly in part. From them certain investigators have drawn conclusions differing greatly fromthe materialistic official verdict, but such speculations have little chance for belief amongthe conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists has not been helped by the actionof superstitious Dr. Dexter, who threw the curious box and angled stone—an object certainlyself-luminous as seen in the black windowless steeple where it was found—into the deepestchannel 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, formthe dominant interpretation given those final frenzied jottings. These are the entries—orall that can be made of them.

I.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope toshew by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman—madderthan the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigheach statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believedotherwise than as 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 notknow—but others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even thestolid police are at their wits’ ends to account for that last terrible visit. They havetried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet theyknow 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 terrorson all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then someevil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike beforereckoning the consequences.

I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he wasso precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I sixteen. He was themost 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 privateeducation 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 closelychained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance toplay unconstrainedly with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange, secretive innerlife in the boy, with imagination as his one avenue of freedom.

At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facilewritings such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings towardart of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit. Whatlay behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, andsubtly fearsome town in which we lived—witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled,sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside thedarkly muttering Miskatonic.

As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustratinga book of Edward’s daemoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby’sodd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-lyrics madea real sensation when issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. He was a closecorrespondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People ofthe Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regardedvillage in Hungary.

In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retardedbecause of his coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependencewere fostered by overcareful 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 thebusiness 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 attempts to raise a moustache were discernibleonly with difficulty. His voice was soft and light, and his pampered, unexercised life gavehim a juvenile chubbiness rather than the paunchiness of premature middle age. He was of goodheight, and his handsome face would have made him a notable gallant had not his shyness heldhim to seclusion and bookishness.

Derby’s parents took him abroad every summer, and he was quick to seizeon the surface aspects of European thought and expression. His Poe-like talents turned moreand more toward the decadent, and other artistic sensitivenesses and yearnings were half-arousedin him. We had great discussions in those days. I had been through Harvard, had studied in aBoston architect’s office, had married, and had finally returned to Arkham to practicemy profession—settling in the family homestead in Saltonstall St. since my father hadmoved to Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost every evening, till I came to regardhim as one of the household. He had a characteristic way of ringing the doorbell or soundingthe knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal, so that after dinner I always listenedfor the familiar three brisk strokes followed by two more after a pause. Less frequently I wouldvisit at his house and note with envy the obscure volumes in his constantly growing library.

Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkham, since his parents wouldnot 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 mathematicsand the sciences. He mingled very little with the other students, though looking enviously atthe “daring” or “Bohemian” set—whose superficially “smart”language and meaninglessly ironic pose he aped, and whose dubious conduct he wished he daredadopt.

What he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subterranean magicallore, for which Miskatonic’s library was and is famous. Always a dweller on the surfaceof phantasy and strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual runes and riddles left by afabulous past for the guidance or puzzlement of posterity. He read things like the frightfulBook of Eibon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbiddenNecronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he had seenthem. Edward was twenty when my son and only child was born, and seemed pleased when I namedthe newcomer Edward Derby Upton, after him.

By the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned manand a fairly well-known poet and fantaisiste, though his lack of contacts and responsibilitieshad slowed down his literary growth by making his products derivative and overbookish. I wasperhaps 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 throughinclination—and moved in society only to the slightest and most perfunctory extent. Whenthe war came both health and ingrained timidity kept him at home. I went to Plattsburg for acommission, but never got overseas.

So the years wore on. Edward’s mother died when he was thirty-four, andfor 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 seemedto 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, andwas present at some extremely wild doings—on one occasion paying heavy blackmail (whichhe borrowed of me) to keep his presence at a certain affair from his father’s notice.Some of the whispered rumours about the wild Miskatonic set were extremely singular. There waseven 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 thetime; and was taking a special course in mediaeval metaphysics at Miskatonic. The daughter ofa friend of mine had met her before—in the Hall School at Kingsport—and had beeninclined to shun her because of her odd reputation. She was dark, smallish, and very good-lookingexcept for overprotuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely sensitivepeople. It was, however, largely her origin and conversation which caused average folk to avoidher. She was one of the Innsmouth Waites, and dark legends have clustered for generations aboutcrumbling, half-deserted Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains aboutthe year 1850, and of a strange element “not quite human” in the ancient familiesof the run-down fishing port—tales such as only old-time Yankees can devise and repeatwith proper awesomeness.

Asenath’s case was aggravated by the fact that she was Ephraim Waite’sdaughter—the child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled. Ephraim livedin 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 werealways boarded, and that strange sounds sometimes floated from within as evening drew on. Theold man was known to have been a prodigious magical student in his day, and legend averred thathe could raise or quell storms at sea according to his whim. I had seen him once or twice inmy youth as he came to Arkham to consult forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hatedhis wolfish, saturnine face with its tangle of iron-grey beard. He had died insane—underrather queer circ*mstances—just before his daughter (by his will made a nominal ward ofthe principal) entered the Hall School, but she had been his morbidly avid pupil and lookedfiendishly like him at times.

The friend whose daughter had gone to school with Asenath Waite repeated manycurious 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 toaccomplish some highly baffling marvels. She professed to be able to raise thunderstorms, thoughher seeming success was generally laid to some uncanny knack at prediction. All animals markedlydisliked her, and she could make any dog howl by certain motions of her right hand. There weretimes when she displayed snatches of knowledge and language very singular—and very shocking—fora young girl; when she would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicablekind, and would seem to extract an obscene and zestful irony from her present situation.

Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over otherpersons. She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-studentshe would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality —asif the subject were placed momentarily in the magician’s body and able to stare half acrossthe room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression. Asenathoften made wild claims about the nature of consciousness and about its independence of the physicalframe—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-reachingcosmic powers. Given a man’s brain, she declared, she could not only equal but surpassher father in mastery of unknown forces.

Edward met Asenath at a gathering of “intelligentsia” held in oneof the students’ rooms, and could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the nextday. He had found her full of the interests and erudition which engrossed him most, and wasin addition wildly taken with her appearance. I had never seen the young woman, and recalledcasual references only faintly, but I knew who she was. It seemed rather regrettable that Derbyshould become so upheaved about her; but I said nothing to discourage him, since infatuationthrives 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 lookeven 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 absolutelywithout lines. Asenath, on the other hand, had the premature crow’s feet which come fromthe exercise of an intense will.

About this time Edward brought the girl to call on me, and I at once saw thathis 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 fromold Mr. Derby, whom I had always admired and respected. He had heard the tales of his son’snew friendship, and had wormed the whole truth out of “the boy”. Edward meant tomarry Asenath, and had even been looking at houses in the suburbs. Knowing my usually greatinfluence with his son, the father wondered if I could help to break the ill-advised affairoff; but I regretfully expressed my doubts. This time it was not a question of Edward’sweak will but of the woman’s strong will. The perennial child had transferred his dependencefrom 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, accordingto 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 fromthe college. Asenath had bought the old Crowninshield place in the country at the end of HighStreet, and they proposed to settle there after a short trip to Innsmouth, whence three servantsand some books and household goods were to be brought. It was probably not so much considerationfor Edward and his father as a personal wish to be near the college, its library, and its crowdof “sophisticates”, that made Asenath settle in Arkham instead of returning permanentlyhome.

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. Helooked soberer and more thoughtful, his habitual pout of childish rebelliousness being exchangedfor a look almost of genuine sadness. I was puzzled to decide whether I liked or disliked thechange. Certainly, he seemed for the moment more normally adult than ever before. Perhaps themarriage was a good thing—might not the change of dependence form a start towardactual neutralisation, 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 Crowninshieldhouse and grounds.

Her home in—that town—was a rather disquieting place, but certainobjects in it had taught him some surprising things. He was progressing fast in esoteric lorenow that he had Asenath’s guidance. Some of the experiments she proposed were very daringand radical—he did not feel at liberty to describe them—but he had confidence inher powers and intentions. The three servants were very queer—an incredibly aged couplewho had been with old Ephraim and referred occasionally to him and to Asenath’s dead motherin a cryptic way, and a swarthy young wench who had marked anomalies of feature and seemed toexude a perpetual odour of fish.

III.

For the next two years I saw less and less of Derby. A fortnight would sometimes slip by withoutthe familiar three-and-two strokes at the front door; and when he did call—or when, ashappened with increasing infrequency, I called on him—he was very little disposed to converseon vital topics. He had become secretive about those occult studies which he used to describeand discuss so minutely, and preferred not to talk of his wife. She had aged tremendously sinceher marriage, till now—oddly enough—she seemed the elder of the two. Her face heldthe most concentratedly determined expression I had ever seen, and her whole aspect seemed togain a vague, unplaceable repulsiveness. My wife and son noticed it as much as I, and we allceased gradually to call on her—for which, Edward admitted in one of his boyishly tactlessmoments, she was unmitigatedly grateful. Occasionally the Derbys would go on long trips—ostensiblyto Europe, though Edward sometimes hinted at obscurer destinations.

It was after the first year that people began talking about the change in EdwardDerby. It was very casual talk, for the change was purely psychological; but it brought up someinteresting points. Now and then, it seemed, Edward was observed to wear an expression and todo things wholly incompatible with his usual flabby nature. For example—although in theold days he could not drive a car, he was now seen occasionally to dash into or out of the oldCrowninshield driveway with Asenath’s powerful Packard, handling it like a master, andmeeting traffic entanglements with a skill and determination utterly alien to his accustomednature. In such cases he seemed always to be just back from some trip or just starting on one—whatsort of trip, no one could guess, although he mostly favoured the Innsmouth road.

Oddly, the metamorphosis did not seem altogether pleasing. People said he lookedtoo much like his wife, or like old Ephraim Waite himself, in these moments—or perhapsthese moments seemed unnatural because they were so rare. Sometimes, hours after starting outin this way, he would return listlessly sprawled on the rear seat of the car while an obviouslyhired chauffeur or mechanic drove. Also, his preponderant aspect on the streets during his decreasinground of social contacts (including, I may say, his calls on me) was the old-time indecisiveone—its irresponsible childishness even more marked than in the past. While Asenath’sface aged, Edward’s—aside from those exceptional occasions—actually relaxedinto a kind of exaggerated immaturity, save when a trace of the new sadness or understandingwould flash across it. It was really very puzzling. Meanwhile the Derbys almost dropped outof the gay college circle—not through their own disgust, we heard, but because somethingabout 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 tome of a certain fear and dissatisfaction. He would let fall remarks about things ‘goingtoo far’, and would talk darkly about the need of ‘saving his identity’. Atfirst I ignored such references, but in time I began to question him guardedly, rememberingwhat my friend’s daughter had said about Asenath’s hypnotic influence over the othergirls at school—the cases where students had thought they were in her body looking acrossthe room at themselves. This questioning seemed to make him at once alarmed and grateful, andonce 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 disorganised. He had seen astonishingly little ofhis parent since his marriage, for Asenath had concentrated in herself all his vital sense offamily linkage. Some called him callous in his loss—especially since those jaunty andconfident moods in the car began to increase. He now wished to move back into the old Derbymansion, but Asenath insisted on staying in the Crowninshield house, to which she had becomewell adjusted.

Not long afterward my wife heard a curious thing from a friend—one ofthe few who had not dropped the Derbys. She had been out to the end of High St. to call on thecouple, and had seen a car shoot briskly out of the drive with Edward’s oddly confidentand almost sneering face above the wheel. Ringing the bell, she had been told by the repulsivewench that Asenath was also out; but had chanced to look up at the house in leaving. There,at one of Edward’s library windows, she had glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face—aface 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 gazingout from it.

Edward’s calls now grew a trifle more frequent, and his hints occasionallybecame 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 hissanity. He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the heartof the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets, ofcomplex angles that lead through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and ofhideous 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 whichutterly nonplussed me—elusively coloured and bafflingly textured objects like nothingever heard of on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose andfollowed no conceivable geometry. These things, he said, came ‘from outside’; andhis wife knew how to get them. Sometimes—but always in frightened and ambiguous whispers—hewould suggest things about old Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen occasionally at the college libraryin the old days. These adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to revolve around some especiallyhorrible doubt as to whether the old wizard were really dead—in a spiritual as well ascorporeal sense.

At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whetherAsenath could possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off through some unknownsort 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 withwords 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 generallyclog his motions or make him forget his destination for the time being. His visits usually camewhen Asenath was away— “away in her own body”, as he once oddly put it. Shealways found out later—the servants watched his goings and comings—but evidentlyshe thought it inexpedient to do anything drastic.

IV.

Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I got the telegram fromMaine. 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 gossips declared there was someone upstairsin the house behind the doubly curtained windows. They had watched the purchases made by theservants. And now the town marshal of Chesuncook had wired of the draggled madman who stumbledout of the woods with delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was Edward—andhe had been just able to recall his own name and my name and address.

Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest beltin Maine, and it took a whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and forbidding sceneryto get there in a car. I found Derby in a cell at the town farm, vacillating between frenzyand apathy. He knew me at once, and began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent torrentof words in my direction.

“Dan—for God’s sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the sixthousand steps . . . the abomination of abominations . . . I neverwould let her take me, and then I found myself there. . . . Iä!Shub-Niggurath! . . . The shape rose up from the altar, and there were 500 that howled. . . .The Hooded Thing bleated “Kamog! Kamog!’—that was old Ephraim’s secretname in the coven. . . . I was there, where she promised she wouldn’t takeme. . . . A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there whereshe had gone with my body—in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the blackrealm begins and the watcher guards the gate. . . . I saw a shoggoth—itchanged shape. . . . I can’t stand it. . . . I won’tstand it. . . . I’ll kill her if she ever sends me there again. . . .I’ll kill that entity . . . her, him, it . . . I’llkill 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 gothim decent clothes in the village, and set out with him for Arkham. His fury of hysteria wasspent, and he was inclined to be silent; though he began muttering darkly to himself when thecar passed through Augusta—as if the sight of a city aroused unpleasant memories. It wasclear that he did not wish to go home; and considering the fantastic delusions he seemed tohave about his wife—delusions undoubtedly springing from some actual hypnotic ordeal towhich 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. LaterI would help him get a divorce, for most assuredly there were mental factors which made thismarriage 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, moredistinctly 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 wholeset of hallucinations around her. His present predicament, he mumbled furtively, was only oneof a long series. She was getting hold of him, and he knew that some day she would never letgo. Even now she probably let him go only when she had to, because she couldn’t hold onlong 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 holdon, and he would find himself suddenly in his own body again in some far-off, horrible, andperhaps 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 againhe had to find his way home from frightful distances, getting somebody to drive the car afterhe 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 hadsensed the mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will in him. Some day she would crowd himout and disappear with his body—disappear to become a great magician like her father andleave him marooned in that female shell that wasn’t even quite human. Yes, he knew aboutthe Innsmouth blood now. There had been traffick with things from the sea—it washorrible. . . . And old Ephraim—he had known the secret, and when he grew olddid a hideous thing to keep alive . . . he wanted to liveforever . . . Asenath would succeed—one successful demonstration had takenplace already.

As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying the impressionof change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in better shape thanusual—harder, more normally developed, and without the trace of sickly flabbiness causedby his indolent habits. It was as if he had been really active and properly exercised for thefirst time in his coddled life, and I judged that Asenath’s force must have pushed himinto 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 recognisedfrom bygone browsings in forbidden volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain threadof mythological consistency—of 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—the wild eyes and the unkemptbeard that never turned white? He glared at me once, and I never forgot it. Now she glaresthat way. And I know why! He found it in the Necronomicon —the formula. Idon’t dare tell you the page yet, but when I do you can read and understand. Then youwill know what has engulfed me. On, on, on, on—body to body to body—he means neverto die. The life-glow—he knows how to break the link . . . it can flickeron 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 whenI saw some hasty notes Asenath had jotted down?”

“Asenath . . . is there such a person? Why didthey half think there was poison in old Ephraim’s stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisperabout the way he shrieked—like a frightened child—when he went mad and Asenath lockedhim up in the padded attic room where—the other—had been? Was it old Ephraim’ssoul that was locked in? Who locked in whom? Why had he been looking for months for someonewith a fine mind and a weak will? Why did he curse that his daughter wasn’t a son? Tellme, Daniel Upton— what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror wherethat blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed, half-human child at his mercy? Didn’the make it permanent—as she’ll do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing thatcalls itself Asenath writes differently when off guard, so that you can’t tell itsscript from . . . “

Then the thing happened. Derby’s voice was rising to a thin treble screamas he raved, when suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought of thoseother occasions at my home when his confidences had abruptly ceased—when I had half fanciedthat some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath’s mental force was intervening to keep himsilent. This, though, was something altogether different—and, I felt, infinitely morehorrible. The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognisably for a moment, while through thewhole body there passed a shivering motion—as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves,and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, andgeneral personality.

Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet thereswept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion—such a freezing, petrifyingsense 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 fromouter 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 companionhad seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him. The dusk was now very thick, andthe 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 energised state—sounlike his usual self—which so many people had noticed. It seemed odd and incredible thatlistless Edward Derby—he who could never assert himself, and who had never learned todrive—should be ordering me about and taking the wheel of my own car, yet that was preciselywhat had happened. He did not speak for some time, and in my inexplicable horror I was gladhe did not.

In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and shiveredat the blaze of his eyes. The people were right—he did look damnably like his wife andlike old Ephraim when in these moods. I did not wonder that the moods were disliked—therewas certainly something unnatural and diabolic in them, and I felt the sinister element allthe more because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This man, for all my lifelong knowledgeof 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 hisvoice seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and more decisive than I had ever knownit 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, atrace of very profound and very genuine irony in the timbre—not the flashy, meaninglesslyjaunty pseudo-irony of the callow “sophisticate”, which Derby had habitually affected,but something grim, basic, pervasive, and potentially evil. I marvelled at the self-possessionso soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering.

“I hope you’ll forget my attack back there, Upton”, he wassaying. “You know what my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I’menormously grateful, of course, for this lift home.”

“And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying aboutmy wife—and about things in general. That’s what comes from overstudy in a fieldlike mine. My philosophy is full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets worn out it cooksup all sorts of imaginary concrete applications. I shall take a rest from now on—you probablywon’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. Thereare certain Indian relics in the north woods—standing stones, and all that—whichmean 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’srelaxation will put me back on my feet.”

I do not recall just what my own part of the conversation was, for the bafflingalienage of my seatmate filled all my consciousness. With every moment my feeling of elusivecosmic horror increased, till at length I was in a virtual delirium of longing for the end ofthe drive. Derby did not offer to relinquish the wheel, and I was glad of the speed with whichPortsmouth and Newburyport flashed by.

At the junction where the main highway runs inland and avoids Innsmouth I washalf 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 reachedArkham before midnight, and found the lights still on at the old Crowninshield house. Derbyleft the car with a hasty repetition of his thanks, and I drove home alone with a curious feelingof relief. It had been a terrible drive—all the more terrible because I could not quitetell why—and I did not regret Derby’s forecast of a long absence from my company.

V.

The next two months were full of rumours. People spoke of seeing Derby more and more in hisnew energised state, and Asenath was scarcely ever in to her few callers. I had only one visitfrom Edward, when he called briefly in Asenath’s car—duly reclaimed from whereverhe had left it in Maine—to get some books he had lent me. He was in his new state, andpaused only long enough for some evasively polite remarks. It was plain that he had nothingto discuss with me when in this condition—and I noticed that he did not even trouble togive 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 departurewas a prodigious relief.

In mid-September Derby was away for a week, and some of the decadent collegeset 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 couldnot get that strange ride from Maine out of my head. The transformation I had witnessed hadaffected me profoundly, and I caught myself again and again trying to account for the thing—andfor the extreme horror it had inspired in me.

But the oddest rumours were those about the sobbing in the old Crowninshieldhouse. The voice seemed to be a woman’s, and some of the younger people thought it soundedlike Asenath’s. It was heard only at rare intervals, and would sometimes be choked offas if by force. There was talk of an investigation, but this was dispelled one day when Asenathappeared in the streets and chatted in a sprightly way with a large number of acquaintances—apologisingfor her recent absences and speaking incidentally about the nervous breakdown and hysteria ofa guest from Boston. The guest was never seen, but Asenath’s appearance left nothing tobe said. And then someone complicated matters by whispering that the sobs had once or twicebeen in a man’s voice.

One evening in mid-October I heard the familiar three-and-two ring at the frontdoor. Answering it myself, I found Edward on the steps, and saw in a moment that his personalitywas the old one which I had not encountered since the day of his ravings on that terrible ridefrom Chesuncook. His face was twitching with a mixture of odd emotions in which fear and triumphseemed to share dominion, and he looked furtively over his shoulder as I closed the door behindhim.

Following me clumsily to the study, he asked for some whiskey to steady hisnerves. I forbore to question him, but waited till he felt like beginning whatever he wantedto say. At length he ventured some information in a choking voice.

“Asenath has gone, Dan. We had a long talk last night while the servantswere out, and I made her promise to stop preying on me. Of course I had certain—certainoccult defences I never told you about. She had to give in, but got frightfully angry. Justpacked up and started for New York—walked right out to catch the 8:20 in to Boston. Isuppose people will talk, but I can’t help that. You needn’t mention that therewas any trouble—just say she’s gone on a long research trip.”

“She’s probably going to stay with one of her horrible groups ofdevotees. I hope she’ll go west and get a divorce—anyhow, I’ve made her promiseto keep away and let me alone. It was horrible, Dan—she was stealing my body—crowdingme out—making a prisoner of me. I laid low and pretended to let her do it, but I had tobe 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—andshe 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. Theywere ugly about it, and asked questions, but they went. They’re her kind—Innsmouthpeople—and were hand and glove with her. I hope they’ll let me alone—I didn’tlike the way they laughed when they walked away. I must get as many of Dad’s old servantsagain as I can. I’ll move back home now.”

“I suppose you think I’m crazy, Dan—but Arkham history oughtto hint at things that back up what I’ve told you—and what I’m going to tellyou. You’ve seen one of the changes, too—in your car after I told you about Asenaththat day coming home from Maine. That was when she got me—drove me out of my body. Thelast thing of the ride I remember was when I was all worked up trying to tell you what thatshe-devil is. Then she got me, and in a flash I was back at the house—in the librarywhere 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 riddenhome with . . . that preying wolf in my body. . . . You oughtto have known the difference!”

I shuddered as Derby paused. Surely, I had known the difference—yetcould 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 forgood at Hallowmass—they hold a Sabbat up there beyond Chesuncook, and the sacrifice wouldhave clinched things. She’d have got me for good . . . she’d havebeen I, and I’d have been she . . . forever . . . too late. . . .My body’d have been hers for good. . . . She’d have been a man, andfully human, just as she wanted to be. . . . I suppose she’d have put meout of the way—killed her own ex-body with me in it, damn her, just as she did before —justas she, he, or it did before. . . .”

Edward’s face was now atrociously distorted, and he bent it uncomfortablyclose to mine as his voice fell to a whisper.

“You must know what I hinted in the car— that she isn’tAsenath at all, but really old Ephraim himself. I suspected it a year and a half ago, butI know it now. Her handwriting shews it when she’s off guard—sometimes she jotsdown a note in writing that’s just like her father’s manuscripts, stroke for stroke—andsometimes she says things that nobody but an old man like Ephraim could say. He changed formswith her when he felt death coming—she was the only one he could find with the right kindof 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’ssoul glaring out of that she-devil’s eyes dozens of times . . . and outof mine when she had control of my body?”

The whisperer was panting, and paused for breath. I said nothing, and whenhe resumed his voice was nearer normal. This, I reflected, was a case for the asylum, but Iwould 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’lltell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into—something of the age-old horrorsthat even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep themalive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do thingsthat nobody ought to be able to do. I’ve been in it up to my neck, but that’s theend. Today I’d burn that damned Necronomicon and all the rest if I were librarianat Miskatonic.”

“But she can’t get me now. I must get out of that accursed houseas soon as I can, and settle down at home. You’ll help me, I know, if I need help. Thosedevilish servants, you know . . . and if people should get too inquisitive aboutAsenath. You see, I can’t give them her address. . . . Then there are certaingroups of searchers—certain cults, you know—that might misunderstand our breakingup . . . some of them have damnably curious ideas and methods. I know you’llstand 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 inthe morning he seemed calmer. We discussed certain possible arrangements for his moving backinto the Derby mansion, and I hoped he would lose no time in making the change. He did not callthe next evening, but I saw him frequently during the ensuing weeks. We talked as little aspossible about strange and unpleasant things, but discussed the renovation of the old Derbyhouse, 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 peculiarlydisturbing one. Gossip, of course, was rife; but that was no novelty in connexion with the strangeménage at the old Crowninshield house. One thing I did not like was what Derby’sbanker let fall in an overexpansive mood at the Miskatonic Club—about the cheques Edwardwas sending regularly to a Moses and Abigail Sargent and a Eunice Babson in Innsmouth. Thatlooked as if those evil-faced servants were extorting some kind of tribute from him—yethe had not mentioned the matter to me.

I wished that the summer—and my son’s Harvard vacation—wouldcome, so that we could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as rapidly as Ihad 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 wasready by December, yet Edward constantly put off moving. Though he hated and seemed to fearthe Crowninshield place, he was at the same time queerly enslaved by it. He could not seem tobegin dismantling things, and invented every kind of excuse to postpone action. When I pointedthis out to him he appeared unaccountably frightened. His father’s old butler—whowas there with other reacquired family servants—told me one day that Edward’s occasionalprowlings about the house, and especially down cellar, looked odd and unwholesome to him. Iwondered if Asenath had been writing disturbing letters, but the butler said there was no mailwhich could have come from her.

VI.

It was about Christmas that Derby broke down one evening while calling on me. I was steeringthe conversation toward next summer’s travels when he suddenly shrieked and leaped upfrom his chair with a look of shocking, uncontrollable fright—a cosmic panic and loathingsuch 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—thatshe-devil—even now—Ephraim—Kamog! Kamog!—The pit of the shoggoths—Iä!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 hisfrenzy sank to a dull apathy. He did not resist, but kept his lips moving as if talking to himself.Presently I realised that he was trying to talk to me, and bent my ear to his mouth to catchthe feeble words.

“. . . again, again . . . she’strying . . . 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 normalsleep overtake him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what would be said of his sanity, andwished to give nature a chance if I possibly could. He waked at midnight, and I put him to bedupstairs, but he was gone by morning. He had let himself quietly out of the house—andhis butler, when called on the wire, said he was at home pacing restlessly about the library.

Edward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I wentdaily to see him. He would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and having anair 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. Hisbutler said he had frightful seizures at night, during which he might eventually do himselfharm.

I had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took thephysician with two specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted from the firstquestions were violent and pitiable—and that evening a closed car took his poor strugglingbody to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his guardian and called on him twice weekly—almostweeping to hear his wild shrieks, awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning repetitions of suchphrases 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 bestto be optimistic. Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his servants to theDerby mansion, which would surely be his sane choice. What to do about the Crowninshield placewith its complex arrangements and collections of utterly inexplicable objects I could not decide,so left it momentarily untouched—telling the Derby housemaid to go over and dust the chiefrooms 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, bya false gleam of hope. One morning late in January the sanitarium telephoned to report thatEdward’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 therecould 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 tookme 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 energised personality which had seemed soforeign to his own nature—the competent personality I had found so vaguely horrible, andwhich Edward himself had once vowed was the intruding soul of his wife. There was the same blazingvision—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 ironyso redolent of potential evil. This was the person who had driven my car through the night fivemonths before—the person I had not seen since that brief call when he had forgotten theold-time doorbell signal and stirred such nebulous fears in me—and now he filled me withthe same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.

He spoke affably of arrangements for release—and there was nothing forme to do but assent, despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I felt that somethingwas terribly, inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were horrors in this thing that I couldnot 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 sardonicin everything the creature said—the Asenath-like eyes lent a special and baffling mockeryto 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 thinkof 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, andby evening I was close to a nervous collapse—a state I admit, though others will vow itcoloured my subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point except that no madness ofmine could account for all the evidence.

VII.

It was in the night—after that second evening—that stark, utter horror burst overme 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 tookdown the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang upand go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someonetrying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquidbubbling noise— “glub . . . glub . . . glub” —whichhad 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 abroken instrument able to receive but not to send, I added, “I can’t hear you. Betterhang up and try Information. “ Immediately I heard the receiver go on the hook at the otherend.

This, I say, was just before midnight. When that call was traced afterwardit was found to come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a week fromthe housemaid’s day to be there. I shall only hint what was found at that house—theupheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt, the hastily rifled wardrobe, thebaffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used stationery, and the detestable stench lingeringover everything. The police, poor fools, have their smug little theories, and are still searchingfor those sinister discharged servants—who have dropped out of sight amidst the presentfurore. They speak of a ghoulish revenge for things that were done, and say I was included becauseI 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 thatbody 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’sevil prying calls them just within our range. Ephraim—Asenath—that devil calledthem 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 physicalform. The next day—in the afternoon, when I pulled out of my prostration and was ableto walk and talk coherently—I went to the madhouse and shot him dead for Edward’sand the world’s sake, but can I be sure till he is cremated? They are keeping the bodyfor some silly autopsies by different doctors—but I say he must be cremated. He mustbe 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 bythe terrors I know are seething around it. One life—Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward—whonow? I will not be driven out of my body . . . I will not changesouls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!

But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak ofwhat the police persistently ignored—the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorousthing met by at least three wayfarers in High St. just before two o’clock, and the natureof the single footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the doorbelland knocker waked me—doorbell and knocker both, plied alternately and uncertainly in akind of weak desperation, and each trying to keep to Edward’s old signal of three-and-twostrokes.

Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door—andremembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it . . . wasEdward 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 robeand bounded downstairs, his return to his own self had brought raving and violence, revokinghis discharge and driving him to a desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he wasgood old Edward again, and I would help him!

When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferablyfoetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw thedwarfed, 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 thedoor opened.

The caller had on one of Edward’s overcoats—its bottom almost touchingthe ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouchhat 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 impaledon the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable foetor, I seizedthis 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 whenhe was close enough to ring—and why was the script so awkward, coarse, and shaky? I couldmake out nothing in the dim half light, so edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumpingmechanically after but pausing on the inner door’s threshold. The odour of this singularmessenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife would notwake 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-rigidhand. This is what it said.

It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had faintedat the end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered upthe threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousnessany more.

The butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hallin the morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairsto bed, but the—other mass—lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men puthandkerchiefs to their noses.

What they finally found inside Edward’s oddly assorted clothes was mostlyliquescent horror. There were bones, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positivelyidentified the skull as Asenath’s.

Ben Hayden was always a stubborn chap, and once he had heard about those strange statues inthe upper Adirondacks, nothing could keep him from going to see them. I had been his closestacquaintance for years, and our Damon and Pythias friendship made us inseparable at all times.So when Ben firmly decided to go—well, I had to trot along too, like a faithful collie.

“Jack”, he said, “you know Henry Jackson, who was up in a shackbeyond Lake Placid for that beastly spot in his lung? Well, he came back the other day nearlycured, but had a lot to say about some devilish queer conditions up there. He ran into the businessall of a sudden and can’t be sure yet that it’s anything more than a case of bizarresculpture; but just the same his uneasy impression sticks.”

“It seems he was out hunting one day, and came across a cave with whatlooked like a dog in front of it. Just as he was expecting the dog to bark he looked again,and saw that the thing wasn’t alive at all. It was a stone dog—such a perfect image,down to the smallest whisker, that he couldn’t decide whether it was a supernaturally cleverstatue or a petrified animal. He was almost afraid to touch it, but when he did he realisedit was surely made of stone.”

“After a while he nerved himself up to go into the cave—and therehe got a still bigger jolt. Only a little way in there was another stone figure—or whatlooked like it—but this time it was a man’s. It lay on the floor, on its side, woreclothes, and had a peculiar smile on its face. This time Henry didn’t stop to do anytouching, but beat it straight for the village, Mountain Top, you know. Of course he askedquestions—but they did not get him very far. He found he was on a ticklish subject, for thenatives only shook their heads, crossed their fingers, and muttered something about a “MadDan’—whoever he was.”

“It was too much for Jackson, so he came home weeks ahead of his plannedtime. He told me all about it because he knows how fond I am of strange things—and oddlyenough, I was able to fish up a recollection that dovetailed pretty neatly with his yarn. Doyou remember Arthur Wheeler, the sculptor who was such a realist that people began calling himnothing but a solid photographer? I think you knew him slightly. Well, as a matter of fact,he ended up in that part of the Adirondacks himself. Spent a lot of time there, and then droppedout of sight. Never heard from again. Now if stone statues that look like men and dogs are turningup around there, it looks to me as if they might be his work—no matter what the rusticssay, or refuse to say, about them. Of course a fellow with Jackson’s nerves might easilyget flighty and disturbed over things like that; but I’d have done a lot of examining beforerunning away.”

“In fact, Jack, I’m going up there now to look things over—andyou’re coming along with me. It would mean a lot to find Wheeler—or any of his work.Anyhow, the mountain air will brace us both up.”

So less than a week later, after a long train ride and a jolting bus trip throughbreathlessly exquisite scenery, we arrived at Mountain Top in the late, golden sunlight of aJune evening. The village comprised only a few small houses, a hotel, and the general storeat which our bus drew up; but we knew that the latter would probably prove a focus for suchinformation. Surely enough, the usual group of idlers was gathered around the steps; and whenwe represented ourselves as health-seekers in search of lodgings they had many recommendationsto offer.

Though we had not planned to do any investigating till the next day, Ben couldnot resist venturing some vague, cautious questions when he noticed the senile garrulousnessof one of the ill-clad loafers. He felt, from Jackson’s previous experience, that it wouldbe useless to begin with references to the queer statues; but decided to mention Wheeler asone whom we had known, and in whose fate we consequently had a right to be interested.

The crowd seemed uneasy when Sam stopped his whittling and started talking,but they had slight occasion for alarm. Even this barefoot old mountain decadent tightened upwhen he heard Wheeler’s name, and only with difficulty could Ben get anything coherentout of him.

“Wheeler?” he had finally wheezed. “Oh, yeh—that felleras was all the time blastin’ rocks and cuttin’ ‘em up into statues. So yew knowedhim, hey? Wal, they ain’t much we kin tell ye, and mebbe that’s too much. He stayedout to Mad Dan’s cabin in the hills—but not so very long. Got so he wa’nt wantedno more . . . by Dan, that is. Kinder soft-spoken and got around Dan’s wifetill the old devil took notice. Pretty sweet on her, I guess. But he took the trail sudden,and nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him since. Dan must a told him sumthin’ prettyplain—bad feller to get agin ye, Dan is! Better keep away from thar, boys, for they ain’tno good in that part of the hills. Dan’s ben workin’ up a worse and worse mood, andain’t seen about no more. Nor his wife, neither. Guess he’s penned her up so’snobody else kin make eyes at her!”

As Sam resumed his whittling after a few more observations, Ben and I exchangedglances. Here, surely, was a new lead which deserved intensive following up. Deciding to lodgeat the hotel, we settled ourselves as quickly as possible; planning for a plunge into the wildhilly country on the next day.

At sunrise we made our start, each bearing a knapsack laden with provisionsand such tools as we thought we might need. The day before us had an almost stimulating airof invitation—through which only a faint undercurrent of the sinister ran. Our rough mountainroad quickly became steep and winding, so that before long our feet ached considerably.

After about two miles we left the road—crossing a stone wall on our rightnear a great elm and striking off diagonally toward a steeper slope according to the chart anddirections which Jackson had prepared for us. It was rough and briery travelling, but we knewthat the cave could not be far off. In the end we came upon the aperture quite suddenly—ablack, bush-grown crevice where the ground shot abruptly upward, and beside it, near a shallowrock pool, a small, still figure stood rigid—as if rivalling its own uncanny petrification.

It was a grey dog—or a dog’s statue—and as our simultaneousgasp died away we scarcely knew what to think. Jackson had exaggerated nothing, and we couldnot believe that any sculptor’s hand had succeeded in producing such perfection. Everyhair of the animal’s magnificent coat seemed distinct, and those on the back were bristledup as if some unknown thing had taken him unaware. Ben, at last half-kindly touching the delicatestony fur, gave vent to an exclamation.

“Good God, Jack, but this can’t be any statue! Look at it—allthe little details, and the way the hair lies! None of Wheeler’s technique here! This isa real dog—though heaven only knows how he ever got in this state. Just like stone—feelfor yourself. Do you suppose there’s any strange gas that sometimes comes out of the caveand does this to animal life? We ought to have looked more into the local legends. And if thisis a real dog—or was a real dog—then that man inside must be the real thing too.”

It was with a good deal of genuine solemnity—almost dread—that we finally crawled on hands and knees through the cave-mouth, Ben leading. The narrowness lookedhardly three feet, after which the grotto expanded in every direction to form a damp, twilightchamber floored with rubble and detritus. For a time we could make out very little, but as werose to our feet and strained our eyes we began slowly to descry a recumbent figure amidst thegreater darkness ahead. Ben fumbled with his flashlight, but hesitated for a moment before turningit on the prostrate figure. We had little doubt that the stony thing was what had once beena man, and something in the thought unnerved us both.

When Ben at last sent forth the electric beam we saw that the object lay onits side, back toward us. It was clearly of the same material as the dog outside, but was dressedin the mouldering and unpetrified remains of rough sport clothing. Braced as we were for a shock,we approached quite calmly to examine the thing; Ben going around to the other side to glimpsethe averted face. Neither could possibly have been prepared for what Ben saw when he flashedthe light on those stony features. His cry was wholly excusable, and I could not help echoingit as I leaped to his side and shared the sight. Yet it was nothing hideous or intrinsicallyterrifying. It was merely a matter of recognition, for beyond the least shadow of a doubt thischilly rock figure with its half-frightened, half-bitter expression had at one time been ourold acquaintance, Arthur Wheeler.

Some instinct sent us staggering and crawling out of the cave, and down thetangled slope to a point whence we could not see the ominous stone dog. We hardly knew whatto think, for our brains were churning with conjectures and apprehensions. Ben, who had knownWheeler well, was especially upset; and seemed to be piecing together some threads I had overlooked.

Again and again as we paused on the green slope he repeated “Poor Arthur, poor Arthur!” but not till he muttered the name “Mad Dan” did Irecall the trouble into which, according to old Sam Poole, Wheeler had run just before his disappearance. Mad Dan,Ben implied, would doubtless be glad to see what had happened. For a moment it flashed overboth of us that the jealous host might have been responsible for the sculptor’s presencein this evil cave, but the thought went as quickly as it came.

The thing that puzzled us most was to account for the phenomenon itself. Whatgaseous emanation or mineral vapour could have wrought this change in so relatively short atime was utterly beyond us. Normal petrification, we know, is a slow chemical replacement processrequiring vast ages for completion; yet here were two stone images which had been living things—orat least Wheeler had—only a few weeks before. Conjecture was useless. Clearly, nothingremained but to notify the authorities and let them guess what they might; and yet at the backof Ben’s head that notion about Mad Dan still persisted. Anyhow, we clawed our way backto the road, but Ben did not turn toward the village, but looked along upward toward where oldSam had said Dan’s cabin lay. It was the second house from the village, the ancient loaferhad wheezed, and lay on the left far back from the road in a thick copse of scrub oaks. BeforeI knew it Ben was dragging me up the sandy highway past a dingy farmstead and into a regionof increasing wildness.

It did not occur to me to protest, but I felt a certain sense of mounting menaceas the familiar marks of agriculture and civilisation grew fewer and fewer. At last the beginningof a narrow, neglected path opened up on our left, while the peaked roof of a squalid, unpaintedbuilding shewed itself beyond a sickly growth of half-dead trees. This, I knew, must be MadDan’s cabin; and I wondered that Wheeler had ever chosen so unprepossessing a place forhis headquarters. I dreaded to walk up that weedy, uninviting path, but could not lag behindwhen Ben strode determinedly along and began a vigorous rapping at the rickety, musty-smellingdoor.

There was no response to the knock, and something in its echoes sent a seriesof shivers through one. Ben, however, was quite unperturbed; and at once began to circle thehouse in quest of unlocked windows. The third that he tried—in the rear of the dismal cabin—provedcapable of opening, and after a boost and a vigorous spring he was safely inside and helpingme after him.

The room in which we landed was full of limestone and granite blocks, chisellingtools and clay models, and we realised at once that it was Wheeler’s erstwhile studio.So far we had not met with any sign of life, but over everything hovered a damnably ominousdusty odour. On our left was an open door evidently leading to a kitchen on the chimney sideof the house, and through this Ben started, intent on finding anything he could concerning hisfriend’s last habitat. He was considerably ahead of me when he crossed the threshold, sothat I could not see at first what brought him up short and wrung a low cry of horror from hislips.

In another moment, though, I did see—and repeated his cry as instinctivelyas I had done in the cave. For here in this cabin—far from any subterranean depths whichcould breed strange gases and work strange mutations—were two stony figures which I knewat once were no products of Arthur Wheeler’s chisel. In a rude armchair before the fireplace,bound in position by the lash of a long rawhide whip, was the form of a man—unkempt, elderly,and with a look of fathomless horror on its evil, petrified face.

On the floor beside it lay a woman’s figure; graceful, and with a facebetokening considerable youth and beauty. Its expression seemed to be one of sardonic satisfaction,and near its outflung right hand was a large tin pail, somewhat stained on the inside, as witha darkish sediment.

We made no move to approach those inexplicably petrified bodies, nor did weexchange any but the simplest conjectures. That this stony couple had been Mad Dan and his wifewe could not well doubt, but how to account for their present condition was another matter.As we looked horrifiedly around we saw the suddenness with which the final development musthave come—for everything about us seemed, despite a heavy coating of dust, to have beenleft in the midst of commonplace household activities.

The only exception to this rule of casualness was on the kitchen table; inwhose cleared centre, as if to attract attention, lay a thin, battered, blank-book weighteddown by a sizeable tin funnel. Crossing to read the thing, Ben saw that it was a kind of diaryor set of dated entries, written in a somewhat cramped and none too practiced hand. The veryfirst words riveted my attention, and before ten seconds had elapsed he was breathlessly devouringthe halting text—I avidly following as I peered over his shoulder. As we read on—movingas we did so into the less loathsome atmosphere of the adjoining room—many obscure thingsbecame terribly clear to us, and we trembled with a mixture of complex emotions.

This is what we read—and what the coroner read later on. The public hasseen a highly twisted and sensationalised version in the cheap newspapers, but not even thathas more than a fraction of the genuine terror which the simple original held for us as we puzzledit out alone in that musty cabin among the wild hills, with two monstrous stone abnormalitieslurking in the death-like silence of the next room. When we had finished Ben pocketed the bookwith a gesture half of repulsion, and his first words were “Let’s get out of here.”

Silently and nervously we stumbled to the front of the house, unlocked thedoor, and began the long tramp back to the village. There were many statements to make and questionsto answer in the days that followed, and I do not think that either Ben or I can ever shakeoff the effects of the whole harrowing experience. Neither can some of the local authoritiesand city reporters who flocked around—even though they burned a certain book and many papersfound in attic boxes, and destroyed considerable apparatus in the deepest part of that sinisterhillside cave. But here is the text itself:

(Here the cramped handwriting trails out in a vague scrawl, giving place toa note in a firmer, evidently feminine handwriting, indicative of great emotional tension.)

I.

It was languid curiosity which first brought Stephen Jones to Rogers’ Museum. Someone hadtold him about the queer underground place in Southwark Street across the river, where waxenthings so much more horrible than the worst effigies at Madame Tussaud’s were shewn, andhe had strolled in one April day to see how disappointing he would find it. Oddly, he was notdisappointed. There was something different and distinctive here, after all. Of course, theusual gory commonplaces were present—Landru, Dr. Crippen, Madame Demers, Rizzio, Lady JaneGrey, endless maimed victims of war and revolution, and monsters like Gilles de Rais and Marquisde Sade—but there were other things which had made him breathe faster and stay till theringing of the closing bell. The man who had fashioned this collection could be no ordinarymountebank. There was imagination—even a kind of diseased genius—in some of this stuff.

Later he had learned about George Rogers. The man had been on the Tussaud staff,but some trouble had developed which led to his discharge. There were aspersions on his sanityand tales of his crazy forms of secret worship—though latterly his success with his ownbasem*nt museum had dulled the edge of some criticisms while sharpening the insidious pointof others. Teratology and the iconography of nightmare were his hobbies, and even he had hadthe prudence to screen off some of his worst effigies in a special alcove for adults only. Itwas this alcove which had fascinated Jones so much. There were lumpish hybrid things which onlyfantasy could spawn, moulded with devilish skill, and coloured in a horribly life-like fashion.

Some were the figures of well-known myth—gorgons, chimaeras, dragons,cyclops, and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from darker and more furtivelywhispered cycles of subterranean legend—black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu,proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumoured blasphemies from forbidden books like theNecronomicon, the Book of Eibon, or the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt.But the worst were wholly original with Rogers, and represented shapes which no tale of antiquityhad ever dared to suggest. Several were hideous parodies on forms of organic life we know, whileothers seemed taken from feverish dreams of other planets and other galaxies. The wilder paintingsof Clark Ashton Smith might suggest a few—but nothing could suggest the effect of poignant,loathsome terror created by their great size and fiendishly cunning workmanship, and by thediabolically clever lighting conditions under which they were exhibited.

Stephen Jones, as a leisurely connoisseur of the bizarre in art, had soughtout Rogers himself in the dingy office and workroom behind the vaulted museum chamber—anevil-looking crypt lighted dimly by dusty windows set slit-like and horizontal in the brickwall on a level with the ancient cobblestones of a hidden courtyard. It was here that the imageswere repaired—here, too, where some of them had been made. Waxen arms, legs, heads, andtorsos lay in grotesque array on various benches, while on high tiers of shelves matted wigs,ravenous-looking teeth, and glassy, staring eyes were indiscriminately scattered. Costumes ofall sorts hung from hooks, and in one alcove were great piles of flesh-coloured wax-cakes andshelves filled with paint-cans and brushes of every description. In the centre of the room wasa large melting-furnace used to prepare the wax for moulding, its fire-box topped by a hugeiron container on hinges, with a spout which permitted the pouring of melted wax with the meresttouch of a finger.

Other things in the dismal crypt were less describable—isolated partsof problematical entities whose assembled forms were the phantoms of delirium. At one end wasa door of heavy plank, fastened by an unusually large padlock and with a very peculiar symbolpainted over it. Jones, who had once had access to the dreaded Necronomicon, shiveredinvoluntarily as he recognised that symbol. This showman, he reflected, must indeed be a personof disconcertingly wide scholarship in dark and dubious fields.

Nor did the conversation of Rogers disappoint him. The man was tall, lean,and rather unkempt, with large black eyes which gazed combustively from a pallid and usuallystubble-covered face. He did not resent Jones’s intrusion, but seemed to welcome the chanceof unburdening himself to an interested person. His voice was of singular depth and resonance,and harboured a sort of repressed intensity bordering on the feverish. Jones did not wonderthat many had thought him mad.

With every successive call—and such calls became a habit as the weekswent by—Jones had found Rogers more communicative and confidential. From the first therehad been hints of strange faiths and practices on the showman’s part, and later on thesehints expanded into tales—despite a few odd corroborative photographs—whose extravagancewas almost comic. It was some time in June, on a night when Jones had brought a bottle of goodwhiskey and plied his host somewhat freely, that the really demented talk first appeared. Beforethat there had been wild enough stories—accounts of mysterious trips to Thibet, the Africaninterior, the Arabian desert, the Amazon valley, Alaska, and certain little-known islands ofthe South Pacific, plus claims of having read such monstrous and half-fabulous books as theprehistoric Pnakotic fragments and the Dhol chants attributed to malign and non-human Leng—butnothing in all this had been so unmistakably insane as what had cropped out that June eveningunder the spell of the whiskey.

To be plain, Rogers began making vague boasts of having found certain thingsin Nature that no one had found before, and of having brought back tangible evidences of suchdiscoveries. According to his bibulous harangue, he had gone farther than anyone else in interpretingthe obscure and primal books he studied, and had been directed by them to certain remote placeswhere strange survivals are hidden—survivals of aeons and life-cycles earlier than mankind,and in some cases connected with other dimensions and other worlds, communication with whichwas frequent in the forgotten pre-human days. Jones marvelled at the fancy which could conjureup such notions, and wondered just what Rogers’ mental history had been. Had his work amidstthe morbid grotesqueries of Madame Tussaud’s been the start of his imaginative flights,or was the tendency innate, so that his choice of occupation was merely one of its manifestations?At any rate, the man’s work was very closely linked with his notions. Even now there wasno mistaking the trend of his blackest hints about the nightmare monstrosities in the screened-off“Adults only” alcove. Heedless of ridicule, he was trying to imply that not all ofthese daemoniac abnormalities were artificial.

It was Jones’s frank scepticism and amusem*nt at these irresponsible claimswhich broke up the growing cordiality. Rogers, it was clear, took himself very seriously; forhe now became morose and resentful, continuing to tolerate Jones only through a dogged urgeto break down his wall of urbane and complacent incredulity. Wild tales and suggestions of ritesand sacrifices to nameless elder gods continued, and now and then Rogers would lead his guestto one of the hideous blasphemies in the screened-off alcove and point out features difficultto reconcile with even the finest human craftsmanship. Jones continued his visits through sheerfascination, though he knew he had forfeited his host’s regard. At times he would try tohumour Rogers with pretended assent to some mad hint or assertion, but the gaunt showman wasseldom to be deceived by such tactics.

The tension came to a head later in September. Jones had casually dropped intothe museum one afternoon, and was wandering through the dim corridors whose horrors were nowso familiar, when he heard a very peculiar sound from the general direction of Rogers’workroom. Others heard it, too, and started nervously as the echoes reverberated through thegreat vaulted basem*nt. The three attendants exchanged odd glances; and one of them, a dark,taciturn, foreign-looking fellow who always served Rogers as a repairer and assistant designer,smiled in a way which seemed to puzzle his colleagues and which grated very harshly on somefacet of Jones’s sensibilities. It was the yelp or scream of a dog, and was such a soundas could be made only under conditions of the utmost fright and agony combined. Its stark, anguishedfrenzy was appalling to hear, and in this setting of grotesque abnormality it held a doublehideousness. Jones remembered that no dogs were allowed in the museum.

He was about to go to the door leading into the workroom, when the dark attendantstopped him with a word and a gesture. Mr. Rogers, the man said in a soft, somewhat accentedvoice at once apologetic and vaguely sardonic, was out, and there were standing orders to admitno one to the workroom during his absence. As for that yelp, it was undoubtedly something outin the courtyard behind the museum. This neighbourhood was full of stray mongrels, and theirfights were sometimes shockingly noisy. There were no dogs in any part of the museum. But ifMr. Jones wished to see Mr. Rogers he might find him just before closing-time.

After this Jones climbed the old stone steps to the street outside and examinedthe squalid neighbourhood curiously. The leaning, decrepit buildings—once dwellings butnow largely shops and warehouses—were very ancient indeed. Some of them were of a gabledtype seeming to go back to Tudor times, and a faint miasmatic stench hung subtly about the wholeregion. Beside the dingy house whose basem*nt held the museum was a low archway pierced by adark cobbled alley, and this Jones entered in a vague wish to find the courtyard behind theworkroom and settle the affair of the dog more comfortably in his mind. The courtyard was dimin the late afternoon light, hemmed in by rear walls even uglier and more intangibly menacingthan the crumbling street facades of the evil old houses. Not a dog was in sight, and Joneswondered how the aftermath of such a frantic turmoil could have completely vanished so soon.

Despite the assistant’s statement that no dog had been in the museum,Jones glanced nervously at the three small windows of the basem*nt workroom—narrow, horizontalrectangles close to the grass-grown pavement, with grimy panes that stared repulsively and incuriouslylike the eyes of dead fish. To their left a worn flight of steps led to an opaque and heavilybolted door. Some impulse urged him to crouch low on the damp, broken cobblestones and peerin, on the chance that the thick green shades, worked by long cords that hung down to a reachablelevel, might not be drawn. The outer surfaces were thick with dirt, but as he rubbed them withhis handkerchief he saw there was no obscuring curtain in the way of his vision.

So shadowed was the cellar from the inside that not much could be made out,but the grotesque working paraphernalia now and then loomed up spectrally as Jones tried eachof the windows in turn. It seemed evident at first that no one was within; yet when he peeredthrough the extreme right-hand window—the one nearest the entrance alley—he saw aglow of light at the farther end of the apartment which made him pause in bewilderment. Therewas no reason why any light should be there. It was an inner side of the room, and he couldnot recall any gas or electric fixture near that point. Another look defined the glow as a largevertical rectangle, and a thought occurred to him. It was in that direction that he had alwaysnoticed the heavy plank door with the abnormally large padlock—the door which was neveropened, and above which was crudely smeared that hideous cryptic symbol from the fragmentaryrecords of forbidden elder magic. It must be open now—and there was a light inside. Allhis former speculations as to where that door led, and as to what lay behind it, were now renewedwith trebly disquieting force.

Jones wandered aimlessly around the dismal locality till close to six o’clock,when he returned to the museum to make the call on Rogers. He could hardly tell why he wishedso especially to see the man just then, but there must have been some subconscious misgivingsabout that terribly unplaceable canine scream of the afternoon, and about the glow of lightin that disturbing and usually unopened inner doorway with the heavy padlock. The attendantswere leaving as he arrived, and he thought that Orabona—the dark foreign-looking assistant—eyedhim with something like sly, repressed amusem*nt. He did not relish that look—even thoughhe had seen the fellow turn it on his employer many times.

The vaulted exhibition room was ghoulish in its desertion, but he strode quicklythrough it and rapped at the door of the office and workroom. Response was slow in coming, thoughthere were footsteps inside. Finally, in response to a second knock, the lock rattled, and theancient six-panelled portal creaked reluctantly open to reveal the slouching, feverish-eyedform of George Rogers. From the first it was clear that the showman was in an unusual mood.There was a curious mixture of reluctance and actual gloating in his welcome, and his talk atonce veered to extravagances of the most hideous and incredible sort.

Surviving elder gods—nameless sacrifices—the other than artificialnature of some of the alcove horrors—all the usual boasts, but uttered in a tone of peculiarlyincreasing confidence. Obviously, Jones reflected, the poor fellow’s madness was gainingon him. From time to time Rogers would send furtive glances toward the heavy, padlocked innerdoor at the end of the room, or toward a piece of coarse burlap on the floor not far from it,beneath which some small object appeared to be lying. Jones grew more nervous as the momentspassed, and began to feel as hesitant about mentioning the afternoon’s oddities as he hadformerly been anxious to do so.

Rogers’ sepulchrally resonant bass almost cracked under the excitementof his fevered rambling.

“Do you remember”, he shouted, “what I told you about that ruinedcity in Indo-China where the Tcho-Tchos lived? You had to admit I’d been there when yousaw the photographs, even if you did think I made that oblong swimmer in darkness out of wax.If you’d seen it writhing in the underground pools as I did. . . .”

“Well, this is bigger still. I never told you about this, because I wantedto work out the later parts before making any claim. When you see the snapshots you’llknow the geography couldn’t have been faked, and I fancy I have another way of provingthat It isn’t any waxed concoction of mine. You’ve never seen it, for the experimentswouldn’t let me keep It on exhibition.”

The showman glanced queerly at the padlocked door.

“It all comes from that long ritual in the eighth Pnakotic fragment. WhenI got it figured out I saw it could have only one meaning. There were things in the north beforethe land of Lomar—before mankind existed—and this was one of them. It took us allthe way to Alaska, and up the Noatak from Fort Morton, but the thing was there as we knew itwould be. Great Cyclopean ruins, acres of them. There was less left than we had hoped for, butafter three million years what could one expect? And weren’t the Esquimau legends all inthe right direction? We couldn’t get one of the beggars to go with us, and had to sledgeall the way back to Nome for Americans. Orabona was no good up in that climate—it madehim sullen and hateful.”

“I’ll tell you later how we found It. When we got the ice blastedout of the pylons of the central ruin the stairway was just as we knew it would be. Some carvingsstill there, and it was no trouble keeping the Yankees from following us in. Orabona shiveredlike a leaf—you’d never think it from the damned insolent way he struts around here.He knew enough of the Elder Lore to be properly afraid. The eternal light was gone, but ourtorches shewed enough. We saw the bones of others who had been before us—aeons ago, whenthe climate was warm. Some of these bones were of things you couldn’t even imagine. Atthe third level down we found the ivory throne the fragments said so much about—and I mayas well tell you it wasn’t empty.”

“The thing on that throne didn’t move—and we knew then thatIt needed the nourishment of sacrifice. But we didn’t want to wake It then. Better to getIt to London first. Orabona and I went to the surface for the big box, but when we had packedit we couldn’t get It up the three flights of steps. These steps weren’t made forhuman beings, and their size bothered us. Anyway, it was devilish heavy. We had to have theAmericans down to get It out. They weren’t anxious to go into the place, but of coursethe worst thing was safely inside the box. We told them it was a batch of ivory carvings—archaeologicalstuff; and after seeing the carved throne they probably believed us. It’s a wonder theydidn’t suspect hidden treasure and demand a share. They must have told queer tales aroundNome later on; though I doubt if they ever went back to those ruins, even for the ivory throne.”

Rogers paused, felt around in his desk, and produced an envelope of good-sizedphotographic prints. Extracting one and laying it face down before him, he handed the rest toJones. The set was certainly an odd one: ice-clad hills, dog sledges, men in furs, and vasttumbled ruins against a background of snow—ruins whose bizarre outlines and enormous stoneblocks could hardly be accounted for. One flashlight view shewed an incredible interior chamberwith wild carvings and a curious throne whose proportion could not have been designed for ahuman occupant. The carvings on the gigantic masonry—high walls and peculiar vaulting overhead—weremainly symbolic, and involved both wholly unknown designs and certain hieroglyphs darkly citedin obscene legends. Over the throne loomed the same dreadful symbol which was now painted onthe workroom wall above the padlocked plank door. Jones darted a nervous glance at the closedportal. Assuredly, Rogers had been to strange places and had seen strange things. Yet this madinterior picture might easily be a fraud—taken from a very clever stage setting. One mustnot be too credulous. But Rogers was continuing:

“Well, we shipped the box from Nome and got to London without any trouble.That was the first time we’d ever brought back anything that had a chance of coming alive.I didn’t put It on display, because there were more important things to do for It. It neededthe nourishment of sacrifice, for It was a god. Of course I couldn’t get It the sort ofsacrifices which It used to have in Its day, for such things don’t exist now. But therewere other things which might do. The blood is the life, you know. Even the lemurs and elementalsthat are older than the earth will come when the blood of men or beasts is offered under theright conditions.”

The expression on the narrator’s face was growing very alarming and repulsive,so that Jones fidgeted involuntarily in his chair. Rogers seemed to notice his guest’snervousness, and continued with a distinctly evil smile.

“It was last year that I got It, and ever since then I’ve been tryingrites and sacrifices. Orabona hasn’t been much help, for he was always against the ideaof waking It. He hates It—probably because he’s afraid of what It will come to mean.He carries a pistol all the time to protect himself—fool, as if there were human protectionagainst It! If I ever see him draw that pistol, I’ll strangle him. He wanted me to killIt and make an effigy of It. But I’ve stuck by my plans, and I’m coming out on topin spite of all the cowards like Orabona and damned snigg*ring sceptics like you, Jones! I’vechanted the rites and made certain sacrifices, and last week the transition came. Thesacrifice was—received and enjoyed!”

Rogers actually licked his lips, while Jones held himself uneasily rigid. Theshowman paused and rose, crossing the room to the piece of burlap at which he had glanced sooften. Bending down, he took hold of one corner as he spoke again.

“You’ve laughed enough at my work—now it’s time for youto get some facts. Orabona tells me you heard a dog screaming around here this afternoon.Do you know what that meant?”

Jones started. For all his curiosity he would have been glad to get out withoutfurther light on the point which had so puzzled him. But Rogers was inexorable, and began tolift the square of burlap. Beneath it lay a crushed, almost shapeless mass which Jones was slowto classify. Was it a once-living thing which some agency had flattened, sucked dry of blood,punctured in a thousand places, and wrung into a limp, broken-boned heap of grotesqueness? Aftera moment Jones realised what it must be. It was what was left of a dog—a dog, perhaps ofconsiderable size and whitish colour. Its breed was past recognition, for distortion had comein nameless and hideous ways. Most of the hair was burned off as by some pungent acid, and theexposed, bloodless skin was riddled by innumerable circular wounds or incisions. The form oftorture necessary to cause such results was past imagining.

Electrified with a pure loathing which conquered his mounting disgust, Jones sprang up with a cry.

“You damned sad*st—you madman—you do a thing like this and dare to speak to a decent man!”

Rogers dropped the burlap with a malignant sneer and faced his oncoming guest.His words held an unnatural calm.

“Why, you fool, do you think I did this? Let us admit that theresults are unbeautiful from our limited human standpoint. What of it? It is not human and doesnot pretend to be. To sacrifice is merely to offer. I gave the dog to It. What happenedis Its work, not mine. It needed the nourishment of the offering, and took it in Itsown way. But let me shew you what It looks like.”

As Jones stood hesitating, the speaker returned to his desk and took up thephotograph he had laid face down without shewing. Now he extended it with a curious look. Jonestook it and glanced at it in an almost mechanical way. After a moment the visitor’s glancebecame sharper and more absorbed, for the utterly satanic force of the object depicted had analmost hypnotic effect. Certainly, Rogers had outdone himself in modelling the eldritch nightmarewhich the camera had caught. The thing was a work of sheer, infernal genius, and Jones wonderedhow the public would react when it was placed on exhibition. So hideous a thing had no rightto exist—probably the mere contemplation of it, after it was done, had completed the unhingingof its maker’s mind and led him to worship it with brutal sacrifices. Only a stout sanitycould resist the insidious suggestion that the blasphemy was—or had once been—somemorbid and exotic form of actual life.

The thing in the picture squatted or was balanced on what appeared to be aclever reproduction of the monstrously carved throne in the other curious photograph. To describeit with any ordinary vocabulary would be impossible, for nothing even roughly correspondingto it has ever come within the imagination of sane mankind. It represented something meant perhapsto be roughly connected with the vertebrates of this planet—though one could not be toosure of that. Its bulk was Cyclopean, for even squatted it towered to almost twice the heightof Orabona, who was shewn beside it. Looking sharply, one might trace its approximations towardthe bodily features of the higher vertebrates.

There was an almost globular torso, with six long, sinuous limbs terminatingin crab-like claws. From the upper end a subsidiary globe bulged forward bubble-like; its triangleof three staring, fishy eyes, its foot-long and evidently flexible proboscis, and a distendedlateral system analogous to gills, suggesting that it was a head. Most of the body was coveredwith what at first appeared to be fur, but which on closer examination proved to be a densegrowth of dark, slender tentacles or sucking filaments, each tipped with a mouth suggestingthe head of an asp. On the head and below the proboscis the tentacles tended to be longer andthicker, and marked with spiral stripes—suggesting the traditional serpent-locks of Medusa.To say that such a thing could have an expression seems paradoxical; yet Jones felt thatthat triangle of bulging fish-eyes and that obliquely poised proboscis all bespoke a blend ofhate, greed, and sheer cruelty incomprehensible to mankind because mixed with other emotionsnot of the world or this solar system. Into this bestial abnormality, he reflected, Rogers musthave poured at once all his malignant insanity and all his uncanny sculptural genius. The thingwas incredible—and yet the photograph proved that it existed.

Rogers interrupted his reveries.

“Well—what do you think of It? Now do you wonder what crushed thedog and sucked it dry with a million mouths? It needed nourishment—and It will need more.It is a god, and I am the first priest of Its latter-day hierarchy. Iä! Shub-Niggurath!The Goat with a Thousand Young!”

Jones lowered the photograph in disgust and pity.

“See here, Rogers, this won’t do. There are limits, you know. It’sa great piece of work, and all that, but it isn’t good for you. Better not see it any more—letOrabona break it up, and try to forget about it. And let me tear this beastly picture up, too.”

With a snarl, Rogers snatched the photograph and returned it to the desk.

“Idiot—you—and you still think It’s all a fraud! You stillthink I made It, and you still think my figures are nothing but lifeless wax! Why, damn you,you’re a worse clod than a wax image yourself! But I’ve got proof this time, and you’regoing to know! Not just now, for It is resting after the sacrifice—but later. Oh, yes—youwill not doubt the power of It then.”

As Rogers glanced toward the padlocked inner door Jones retrieved his hat and stick from a nearby bench.

“Very well, Rogers, let it be later. I must be going now, but I’llcall around tomorrow afternoon. Think my advice over and see if it doesn’t sound sensible.Ask Orabona what he thinks, too.”

Rogers actually bared his teeth in wild-beast fashion.

“Must be going now, eh? Afraid, after all! Afraid, for all your bold talk!You say the effigies are only wax, and yet you run away when I begin to prove that they aren’t.You’re like the fellows who take my standing bet that they daren’t spend the nightin the museum—they come boldly enough, but after an hour they shriek and hammer to getout! Want me to ask Orabona, eh? You two—always against me! You want to break down thecoming earthly reign of It!”

Jones preserved his calm.

“No, Rogers—there’s nobody against you. And I’m not afraid of your figures, either, much as I admire your skill. But we’re both a bit nervoustonight, and I fancy some rest will do us good.”

Again Rogers checked his guest’s departure.

“Not afraid, eh?—then why are you so anxious to go? Look here—doyou or don’t you dare to stay alone here in the dark? What’s your hurry if you don’tbelieve in It?”

Some new idea seemed to have struck Rogers, and Jones eyed him closely.

“Why, I’ve no special hurry—but what would be gained by my stayinghere alone? What would it prove? My only objection is that it isn’t very comfortable forsleeping. What good would it do either of us?”

This time it was Jones who was struck with an idea. He continued in a tone of conciliation.

“See here, Rogers—I’ve just asked you what it would prove ifI stayed, when we both know. It would prove that your effigies are just effigies, and that yououghtn’t to let your imagination go the way it’s been going lately. Suppose I dostay. If I stick it out till morning, will you agree to take a new view of things—go ona vacation for three months or so and let Orabona destroy that new thing of yours? Come, now—isn’tthat fair?”

The expression on the showman’s face was hard to read. It was obviousthat he was thinking quickly, and that of sundry conflicting emotions, malign triumph was gettingthe upper hand. His voice held a choking quality as he replied.

“Fair enough! If you do stick it out, I’ll take your advice.But stick you must. We’ll go out for dinner and come back. I’ll lock you in the displayroom and go home. In the morning I’ll come down ahead of Orabona—he comes half anhour before the rest—and see how you are. But don’t try it unless you are verysure of your scepticism. Others have backed out—you have that chance. And I suppose a poundingon the outer door would always bring a constable. You may not like it so well after a while—you’llbe in the same building, though not in the same room with It.”

As they left the rear door into the dingy courtyard, Rogers took with him thepiece of burlap—weighted with a gruesome burden. Near the centre of the court was a manhole,whose cover the showman lifted quietly, and with a shuddersome suggestion of familiarity. Burlapand all, the burden went down to the oblivion of a cloacal labyrinth. Jones shuddered, and almostshrank from the gaunt figure at his side as they emerged into the street.

By unspoken mutual consent, they did not dine together, but agreed to meet in front of the museum at eleven.

Jones hailed a cab, and breathed more freely when he had crossed Waterloo Bridgeand was approaching the brilliantly lighted Strand. He dined at a quiet café, and subsequentlywent to his home in Portland Place to bathe and get a few things. Idly he wondered what Rogerswas doing. He had heard that the man had a vast, dismal house in the Walworth Road, full ofobscure and forbidden books, occult paraphernalia, and wax images which he did not choose toplace on exhibition. Orabona, he understood, lived in separate quarters in the same house.

At eleven Jones found Rogers waiting by the basem*nt door in Southwark Street.Their words were few, but each seemed taut with a menacing tension. They agreed that the vaultedexhibition room alone should form the scene of the vigil, and Rogers did not insist that thewatcher sit in the special adult alcove of supreme horrors. The showman, having extinguishedall the lights with switches in the workroom, locked the door of that crypt with one of thekeys on his crowded ring. Without shaking hands he passed out the street door, locked it afterhim, and stamped up the worn steps to the sidewalk outside. As his tread receded, Jones realisedthat the long, tedious vigil had commenced.

II.

Later, in the utter blackness of the great arched cellar, Jones cursed thechildish naiveté which had brought him there. For the first half-hour he had kept flashingon his pocket-light at intervals, but now just sitting in the dark on one of the visitors’benches had become a more nerve-racking thing. Every time the beam shot out it lighted up somemorbid, grotesque object—a guillotine, a nameless hybrid monster, a pasty-bearded facecrafty with evil, a body with red torrents streaming from a severed throat. Jones knew thatno sinister reality was attached to these things, but after that first half-hour he preferrednot to see them.

Why he had bothered to humour that madman he could scarcely imagine. It wouldhave been much simpler merely to have let him alone, or to have called in a mental specialist.Probably, he reflected, it was the fellow-feeling of one artist for another. There was so muchgenius in Rogers that he deserved every possible chance to be helped quietly out of his growingmania. Any man who could imagine and construct the incredibly life-like things that he had producedwas surely not far from actual greatness. He had the fancy of a Sime or a Doré joinedto the minute, scientific craftsmanship of a Blatschka. Indeed, he had done for the world ofnightmare what the Blatschkas with their marvellously accurate plant models of finely wroughtand coloured glass had done for the world of botany.

At midnight the strokes of a distant clock filtered through the darkness, andJones felt cheered by the message from a still-surviving outside world. The vaulted museum chamberwas like a tomb—ghastly in its utter solitude. Even a mouse would be cheering company;yet Rogers had once boasted that—for “certain reasons”, as he said—no miceor even insects ever came near the place. That was very curious, yet it seemed to be true. Thedeadness and silence were virtually complete. If only something would make a sound! He shuffledhis feet, and the echoes came spectrally out of the absolute stillness. He coughed, but therewas something mocking in the staccato reverberations. He could not, he vowed, begin talkingto himself. That meant nervous disintegration. Time seemed to pass with abnormal and disconcertingslowness. He could have sworn that hours had elapsed since he last flashed the light on hiswatch, yet here was only the stroke of midnight.

He wished that his senses were not so preternaturally keen. Something in thedarkness and stillness seemed to have sharpened them, so that they responded to faint intimationshardly strong enough to be called true impressions. His ears seemed at times to catch a faint,elusive susurrus which could not quite be identified with the nocturnal hum of the squalidstreets outside, and he thought of vague, irrelevant things like the music of the spheres andthe unknown, inaccessible life of alien dimensions pressing on our own. Rogers often speculatedabout such things.

The floating specks of light in his blackness-drowned eyes seemed inclinedto take on curious symmetries of pattern and motion. He had often wondered about those strangerays from the unplumbed abyss which scintillate before us in the absence of all earthly illumination,but he had never known any that behaved just as these were behaving. They lacked the restfulaimlessness of ordinary light-specks—suggesting some will and purpose remote from any terrestrialconception.

Then there was that suggestion of odd stirrings. Nothing was open, yet in spiteof the general draughtlessness Jones felt that the air was not uniformly quiet. There were intangiblevariations in pressure—not quite decided enough to suggest the loathsome pawings of unseenelementals. It was abnormally chilly, too. He did not like any of this. The air tasted salty,as if it were mixed with the brine of dark subterrene waters, and there was a bare hint of someodour of ineffable mustiness. In the daytime he had never noticed that the waxen figures hadan odour. Even now that half-received hint was not the way wax figures ought to smell. It wasmore like the faint smell of specimens in a natural-history museum. Curious, in view of Rogers’claims that his figures were not all artificial—indeed, it was probably that claim whichmade one’s imagination conjure up the olfactory suspicion. One must guard against excessesof the imagination—had not such things driven poor Rogers mad?

But the utter loneliness of this place was frightful. Even the distant chimesseemed to come from across cosmic gulfs. It made Jones think of that insane picture which Rogershad shewed him—the wildly carved chamber with the cryptic throne which the fellow had claimedwas part of a three-million-year-old ruin in the shunned and inaccessible solitudes of the Arctic.Perhaps Rogers had been to Alaska, but that picture was certainly nothing but stage scenery.It couldn’t normally be otherwise, with all that carving and those terrible symbols. Andthat monstrous shape supposed to have been found on that throne—what a flight of diseasedfancy! Jones wondered just how far he actually was from the insane masterpiece in wax—probablyit was kept behind that heavy, padlocked plank door leading somewhere out of the workroom. Butit would never do to brood about a waxen image. Was not the present room full of such things,some of them scarcely less horrible than the dreadful “IT”? And beyond a thin canvasscreen on the left was the “Adults only” alcove with its nameless phantoms of delirium.

The proximity of the numberless waxen shapes began to get on Jones’s nervesmore and more as the quarter-hours wore on. He knew the museum so well that he could not getrid of their usual images even in the total darkness. Indeed, the darkness had the effect ofadding to the remembered images certain very disturbing imaginative overtones. The guillotineseemed to creak, and the bearded face of Landru—slayer of his fifty wives—twisteditself into expressions of monstrous menace. From the severed throat of Madame Demers a hideousbubbling sound seemed to emanate, while the headless, legless victim of a trunk murder triedto edge closer and closer on its gory stumps. Jones began shutting his eyes to see if that woulddim the images, but found it was useless. Besides, when he shut his eyes the strange, purposefulpatterns of light-specks became more disturbingly pronounced.

Then suddenly he began trying to keep the hideous images he had formerly beentrying to banish. He tried to keep them because they were giving place to still more hideousones. In spite of himself his memory began reconstructing the utterly non-human blasphemiesthat lurked in the obscurer corners, and these lumpish hybrid growths oozed and wriggled towardhim as though hunting him down in a circle. Black Tsathoggua moulded itself from a toad-likegargoyle to a long, sinuous line with hundreds of rudimentary feet, and a lean, rubbery night-gauntspread its wings as if to advance and smother the watcher. Jones braced himself to keep fromscreaming. He knew he was reverting to the traditional terrors of his childhood, and resolvedto use his adult reason to keep the phantoms at bay. It helped a bit, he found, to flash thelight again. Frightful as were the images it shewed, these were not as bad as what his fancycalled out of the utter blackness.

But there were drawbacks. Even in the light of his torch he could not helpsuspecting a slight, furtive trembling on the part of the canvas partition screening off theterrible “Adults only” alcove. He knew what lay beyond, and shivered. Imaginationcalled up the shocking form of fabulous Yog-Sothoth—only a congeries of iridescent globes,yet stupendous in its malign suggestiveness. What was this accursed mass slowly floating towardhim and bumping on the partition that stood in the way? A small bulge in the canvas far to theright suggested the sharp horn of Gnoph-keh, the hairy myth-thing of the Greenland ice, thatwalked sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, and sometimes on six. To get this stuff outof his head Jones walked boldly toward the hellish alcove with torch burning steadily. Of course,none of his fears was true. Yet were not the long, facial tentacles of great Cthulhu actuallyswaying, slowly and insidiously? He knew they were flexible, but he had not realised that thedraught caused by his advance was enough to set them in motion.

Returning to his former seat outside the alcove, he shut his eyes and let thesymmetrical light-specks do their worst. The distant clock boomed a single stroke. Could itbe only one? He flashed the light on his watch and saw that it was precisely that hour. It wouldbe hard indeed waiting for morning. Rogers would be down at about eight o’clock, aheadof even Orabona. It would be light outside in the main basem*nt long before that, but none ofit could penetrate here. All the windows in this basem*nt had been bricked up but the threesmall ones facing the court. A pretty bad wait, all told.

His ears were getting most of the hallucinations now—for he could swearhe heard stealthy, plodding footsteps in the workroom beyond the closed and locked door. Hehad no business thinking of that unexhibited horror which Rogers called “It”. Thething was a contamination—it had driven its maker mad, and now even its picture was callingup imaginative terrors. It could not be in the workroom—it was very obviously beyond thatpadlocked door of heavy planking. Those steps were certainly pure imagination.

Then he thought he heard the key turn in the workroom door. Flashing on historch, he saw nothing but the ancient six-panelled portal in its proper position. Again he trieddarkness and closed eyes, but there followed a harrowing illusion of creaking—not the guillotinethis time, but the slow, furtive opening of the workroom door. He would not scream. Once hescreamed, he would be lost. There was a sort of padding or shuffling audible now, and it wasslowly advancing toward him. He must retain command of himself. Had he not done so when thenameless brain-shapes tried to close in on him? The shuffling crept nearer, and his resolutionfailed. He did not scream but merely gulped out a challenge.

“Who goes there? Who are you? What do you want?”

There was no answer, but the shuffling kept on. Jones did not know which hefeared most to do—turn on his flashlight or stay in the dark while the thing crept uponhim. This thing was different, he felt profoundly, from the other terrors of the evening. Hisfingers and throat worked spasmodically. Silence was impossible, and the suspense of utter blacknesswas beginning to be the most intolerable of all conditions. Again he cried out hysterically— “Halt!Who goes there?”—as he switched on the revealing beams of his torch. Then, paralysedby what he saw, he dropped the flashlight and screamed—not once but many times.

Shuffling toward him in the darkness was the gigantic, blasphemous form ofa black thing not wholly ape and not wholly insect. Its hide hung loosely upon its frame, andits rugose, dead-eyed rudiment of a head swayed drunkenly from side to side. Its fore paws wereextended, with talons spread wide, and its whole body was taut with murderous malignity despiteits utter lack of facial expression. After the screams and the final coming of darkness it leaped,and in a moment had Jones pinned to the floor. There was no struggle, for the watcher had fainted.

Jones’s fainting spell could not have lasted more than a moment, for thenameless thing was apishly dragging him through the darkness when he began recovering consciousness.What started him fully awake were the sounds which the thing was making—or rather, thevoice with which it was making them. That voice was human, and it was familiar. Only one livingbeing could be behind the hoarse, feverish accents which were chanting to an unknown horror.

“Iä! Iä!” it was howling. “I am coming, O Rhan-Tegoth,coming with the nourishment. You have waited long and fed ill, but now you shall have what waspromised. That and more, for instead of Orabona it will be one of high degree who had doubtedyou. You shall crush and drain him, with all his doubts, and grow strong thereby. And ever afteramong men he shall be shewn as a monument to your glory. Rhan-Tegoth, infinite and invincible,I am your slave and high-priest. You are hungry, and I provide. I read the sign and have ledyou forth. I shall feed you with blood, and you shall feed me with power. Iä! Shub-Niggurath!The Goat with a Thousand Young!”

In an instant all the terrors of the night dropped from Jones like a discardedcloak. He was again master of his mind, for he knew the very earthly and material peril he hadto deal with. This was no monster of fable, but a dangerous madman. It was Rogers, dressed insome nightmare covering of his own insane designing, and about to make a frightful sacrificeto the devil-god he had fashioned out of wax. Clearly, he must have entered the workroom fromthe rear courtyard, donned his disguise, and then advanced to seize his neatly trapped and fear-brokenvictim. His strength was prodigious, and if he was to be thwarted, one must act quickly. Countingon the madman’s confidence in his unconsciousness he determined to take him by surprise,while his grasp was relatively lax. The feel of a threshold told him he was crossing into thepitch-black workroom.

With the strength of mortal fear Jones made a sudden spring from the half-recumbentposture in which he was being dragged. For an instant he was free of the astonished maniac’shands, and in another instant a lucky lunge in the dark had put his own hands at his captor’sweirdly concealed throat. Simultaneously Rogers gripped him again, and without further preliminariesthe two were locked in a desperate struggle of life and death. Jones’s athletic training,without doubt, was his sole salvation; for his mad assailant, freed from every inhibition offair play, decency, or even self-preservation, was an engine of savage destruction as formidableas a wolf or panther.

Guttural cries sometimes punctured the hideous tussle in the dark. Blood spurted,clothing ripped, and Jones at last felt the actual throat of the maniac, shorn of its spectralmask. He spoke not a word, but put every ounce of energy into the defence of his life. Rogerskicked, gouged, butted, bit, clawed, and spat—yet found strength to yelp out actual sentencesat times. Most of his speech was in a ritualistic jargon full of references to “It”or “Rhan-Tegoth”, and to Jones’s overwrought nerves it seemed as if the criesechoed from an infinite distance of daemoniac snortings and bayings. Toward the last they wererolling on the floor, overturning benches or striking against the walls and the brick foundationsof the central melting-furnace. Up to the very end Jones could not be certain of saving himself,but chance finally intervened in his favour. A jab of his knee against Rogers’ chest produceda general relaxation, and a moment later he knew he had won.

Though hardly able to hold himself up, Jones rose and stumbled about the wallsseeking the light-switch—for his flashlight was gone, together with most of his clothing.As he lurched along he dragged his limp opponent with him, fearing a sudden attack when themadman came to. Finding the switch-box, he fumbled till he had the right handle. Then, as thewildly disordered workroom burst into sudden radiance, he set about binding Rogers with suchcords and belts as he could easily find. The fellow’s disguise—or what was left ofit—seemed to be made of a puzzlingly queer sort of leather. For some reason it made Jones’sflesh crawl to touch it, and there seemed to be an alien, rusty odour about it. In the normalclothes beneath it was Rogers’ key-ring, and this the exhausted victor seized as his finalpassport to freedom. The shades at the small, slit-like windows were all securely drawn, andhe let them remain so.

Washing off the blood of battle at a convenient sink, Jones donned the mostordinary-looking and least ill-fitting clothes he could find on the costume hooks. Testing thedoor to the courtyard, he found it fastened with a spring-lock which did not require a key fromthe inside. He kept the key-ring, however, to admit him on his return with aid—for plainly,the thing to do was to call in an alienist. There was no telephone in the museum, but it wouldnot take long to find an all-night restaurant or chemist’s shop where one could be had.He had almost opened the door to go when a torrent of hideous abuse from across the room toldhim that Rogers—whose visible injuries were confined to a long, deep scratch down the leftcheek—had regained consciousness.

“Fool! Spawn of Noth-Yidik and effluvium of K’thun! Son of the dogsthat howl in the maelstrom of Azathoth! You would have been sacred and immortal, and now youare betraying It and Its priest! Beware—for It is hungry! It would have been Orabona—thatdamned treacherous dog ready to turn against me and It—but I give you the first honourinstead. Now you must both beware, for It is not gentle without Its priest.”

“Iä! Iä! Vengeance is at hand! Do you know you would have beenimmortal? Look at the furnace! There is a fire ready to light, and there is wax in the kettle.I would have done with you as I have done with other once-living forms. Hei! You, who have vowedall my effigies are waxen, would have become a waxen effigy yourself! The furnace was all ready!When It had had Its fill, and you were like that dog I shewed you, I would have made your flattened,punctured fragments immortal! Wax would have done it. Haven’t you said I’m a greatartist? Wax in every pore—wax over every square inch of you—Iä! Iä! Andever after the world would have looked at your mangled carcass and wondered how I ever imaginedand made such a thing! Hei! And Orabona would have come next, and others after him—andthus would my waxen family have grown!”

“Dog—do you still think I made all my effigies? Why not saypreserved? You know by this time the strange places I’ve been to, and the strangethings I’ve brought back. Coward—you could never face the dimensional shambler whosehide I put on to scare you—the mere sight of it alive, or even the full-fledged thoughtof it, would kill you instantly with fright! Iä! Iä! It waits hungry for the bloodthat is the life!”

Rogers, propped against the wall, swayed to and fro in his bonds.

“See here, Jones—if I let you go will you let me go? It must be takencare of by Its high-priest. Orabona will be enough to keep It alive—and when he is finishedI will make his fragments immortal in wax for the world to see. It could have been you, butyou have rejected the honour. I won’t bother you again. Let me go, and I will share withyou the power that It will bring me. Iä! Iä! Great is Rhan-Tegoth! Let me go! Letme go! It is starving down there beyond that door, and if It dies the Old Ones can never comeback. Hei! Hei! Let me go!”

Jones merely shook his head, though the hideousness of the showman’s imaginingsrevolted him. Rogers, now staring wildly at the padlocked plank door, thumped his head againand again against the brick wall and kicked with his tightly bound ankles. Jones was afraidhe would injure himself, and advanced to bind him more firmly to some stationary object. Writhing,Rogers edged away from him and set up a series of frenetic ululations whose utter, monstrousunhumanness was appalling, and whose sheer volume was almost incredible. It seemed impossiblethat any human throat could produce noises so loud and piercing, and Jones felt that if thiscontinued there would be no need to telephone for aid. It could not be long before a constablewould investigate, even granting that there were no listening neighbours in this deserted warehousedistrict.

“Wza-y’ei! Wza-y’ei!” howled the madman. “Y’kaahaa bho—ii, Rhan-Tegoth—Cthulhu fhtagn—Ei! Ei! Ei! Ei!—Rhan-Tegoth, Rhan-Tegoth,Rhan-Tegoth!”

The tautly trussed creature, who had started squirming his way across the litteredfloor, now reached the padlocked plank door and commenced knocking his head thunderously againstit. Jones dreaded the task of binding him further, and wished he were not so exhausted fromthe previous struggle. This violent aftermath was getting hideously on his nerves, and he beganto feel a return of the nameless qualms he had felt in the dark. Everything about Rogers andhis museum was so hellishly morbid and suggestive of black vistas beyond life! It was loathsometo think of the waxen masterpiece of abnormal genius which must at this very moment be lurkingclose at hand in the blackness beyond the heavy, padlocked door.

And now something happened which sent an additional chill down Jones’sspine, and caused every hair—even the tiny growth on the backs of his hands—to bristlewith a vague fright beyond classification. Rogers had suddenly stopped screaming and beatinghis head against the stout plank door, and was straining up to a sitting posture, head co*ckedon one side as if listening intently for something. All at once a smile of devilish triumphoverspread his face, and he began speaking intelligibly again—this time in a hoarse whispercontrasting oddly with his former stentorian howling.

“Listen, fool! Listen hard! It has heard me, and is coming. Can’tyou hear It splashing out of Its tank down there at the end of the runway? I dug it deep, becausethere was nothing too good for It. It is amphibious, you know—you saw the gills in thepicture. It came to the earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where the cities are under the warm deepsea. It can’t stand up in there—too tall—has to sit or crouch. Let me get mykeys—we must let It out and kneel down before It. Then we will go out and find a dog orcat—or perhaps a drunken man—to give It the nourishment It needs.”

It was not what the madman said, but the way he said it, that disorganisedJones so badly. The utter, insane confidence and sincerity in that crazed whisper were damnablycontagious. Imagination, with such a stimulus, could find an active menace in the devilish waxfigure that lurked unseen just beyond the heavy planking. Eyeing the door in unholy fascination,Jones noticed that it bore several distinct cracks, though no marks of violent treatment werevisible on this side. He wondered how large a room or closet lay behind it, and how the waxenfigure was arranged. The maniac’s idea of a tank and runway was as clever as all his otherimaginings.

Then, in one terrible instant, Jones completely lost the power to draw a breath.The leather belt he had seized for Rogers’ further strapping fell from his limp hands,and a spasm of shivering convulsed him from head to foot. He might have known the place woulddrive him mad as it had driven Rogers—and now he was mad. He was mad, for he nowharboured hallucinations more weird than any which had assailed him earlier that night. Themadman was bidding him hear the splashing of a mythical monster in a tank beyond the door—andnow, God help him, he did hear it!

Rogers saw the spasm of horror reach Jones’s face and transform it toa staring mask of fear. He cackled.

“At last, fool, you believe! At last you know! You hear It and It comes! Get me my keys, fool—we must do homage and serve It!”

But Jones was past paying attention to any human words, mad or sane. Phobicparalysis held him immobile and half-conscious, with wild images racing phantasmagorically throughhis helpless imagination. There was a splashing. There was a padding or shuffling,as of great wet paws on a solid surface. Something was approaching. Into his nostrils,from the cracks in that nightmare plank door, poured a noisome animal stench like and yet unlikethat of the mammal cages at the zoölogical gardens in Regent’s Park.

He did not know now whether Rogers was talking or not. Everything real hadfaded away, and he was a statue obsessed with dreams and hallucinations so unnatural that theybecame almost objective and remote from him. He thought he heard a sniffing or snorting fromthe unknown gulf beyond the door, and when a sudden baying, trumpeting noise assailed his earshe could not feel sure that it came from the tightly bound maniac whose image swam uncertainlyin his shaken vision. The photograph of that accursed, unseen wax thing persisted in floatingthrough his consciousness. Such a thing had no right to exist. Had it not driven him mad?

Even as he reflected, a fresh evidence of madness beset him. Something, hethought, was fumbling with the latch of the heavy padlocked door. It was patting and pawingand pushing at the planks. There was a thudding on the stout wood, which grew louder and louder.The stench was horrible. And now the assault on that door from the inside was a malign, determinedpounding like the strokes of a battering-ram. There was an ominous cracking—a splintering—awelling foetor—a falling plank— a black paw ending in a crab-like claw. . . .

“Help! Help! God help me! . . . Aaaaaaa! . . .”

With intense effort Jones is today able to recall a sudden bursting of hisfear-paralysis into the liberation of frenzied automatic flight. What he evidently did musthave paralleled curiously the wild, plunging flights of maddest nightmares; for he seems tohave leaped across the disordered crypt at almost a single bound, yanked open the outside door,which closed and locked itself after him with a clatter, sprung up the worn stone steps threeat a time, and raced frantically and aimlessly out of that dank cobblestoned court and throughthe squalid streets of Southwark.

Here the memory ends. Jones does not know how he got home, and there is noevidence of his having hired a cab. Probably he raced all the way by blind instinct—overWaterloo Bridge, along the Strand and Charing Cross, and up Haymarket and Regent Street to hisown neighbourhood. He still had on the queer mélange of museum costumes when he grewconscious enough to call the doctor.

A week later the nerve specialists allowed him to leave his bed and walk inthe open air.

But he had not told the specialists much. Over his whole experience hung apall of madness and nightmare, and he felt that silence was the only course. When he was up,he scanned intently all the papers which had accumulated since that hideous night, but foundno reference to anything queer at the museum. How much, after all, had been reality? Where didreality end and morbid dream begin? Had his mind gone wholly to pieces in that dark exhibitionchamber, and had the whole fight with Rogers been a phantasm of fever? It would help to puthim on his feet if he could settle some of these maddening points. He must have seenthat damnable photograph of the wax image called “It”, for no brain but Rogers’could ever have conceived such a blasphemy.

It was a fortnight before he dared to enter Southwark Street again. He wentin the middle of the morning, when there was the greatest amount of sane, wholesome activityaround the ancient, crumbling shops and warehouses. The museum’s sign was still there,and as he approached he saw that the place was open. The gateman nodded in a pleasant recognitionas he summoned up the courage to enter, and in the vaulted chamber below an attendant touchedhis cap cheerfully. Perhaps everything had been a dream. Would he dare to knock at the doorof the workroom and look for Rogers?

Then Orabona advanced to greet him. His dark, sleek face was a trifle sardonic,but Jones felt that he was not unfriendly. He spoke with a trace of accent.

“Good morning, Mr. Jones. It is some time since we have seen you here.Did you wish Mr. Rogers? I’m sorry, but he is away. He had word of business in America,and had to go. Yes, it was very sudden. I am in charge now—here, and at the house. I tryto maintain Mr. Rogers’ high standard—till he is back.”

The foreigner smiled—perhaps from affability alone. Jones scarcely knewhow to reply, but managed to mumble out a few inquiries about the day after his last visit.Orabona seemed greatly amused by the questions, and took considerable care in framing his replies.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Jones—the twenty-eighth of last month. I remember itfor many reasons. In the morning—before Mr. Rogers got here, you understand—I foundthe workroom in quite a mess. There was a great deal of—cleaning up—to do. There hadbeen—late work, you see. Important new specimen given its secondary baking process. I tookcomplete charge when I came.”

“It was a hard specimen to prepare—but of course Mr. Rogers has taughtme a great deal. He is, as you know, a very great artist. When he came he helped me completethe specimen—helped very materially, I assure you—but he left soon without even greetingthe men. As I tell you, he was called away suddenly. There were important chemical reactionsinvolved. They made loud noises—in fact, some teamsters in the court outside fancy theyheard several pistol shots—very amusing idea!”

“As for the new specimen—that matter is very unfortunate. It is agreat masterpiece—designed and made, you understand, by Mr. Rogers. He will see about itwhen he gets back.”

Again Orabona smiled.

“The police, you know. We put it on display a week ago, and there weretwo or three faintings. One poor fellow had an epileptic fit in front of it. You see, it isa trifle—stronger—than the rest. Larger, for one thing. Of course, it was in the adultalcove. The next day a couple of men from Scotland Yard looked it over and said it was too morbidto be shewn. Said we’d have to remove it. It was a tremendous shame—such a masterpieceof art—but I didn’t feel justified in appealing to the courts in Mr. Rogers’absence. He would not like so much publicity with the police now—but when he gets back—whenhe gets back—”

For some reason or other Jones felt a mounting tide of uneasiness and repulsion.But Orabona was continuing.

“You are a connoisseur, Mr. Jones. I am sure I violate no law in offeringyou a private view. It may be—subject, of course, to Mr. Rogers’ wishes—thatwe shall destroy the specimen some day—but that would be a crime.”

Jones had a powerful impulse to refuse the sight and flee precipitately, butOrabona was leading him forward by the arm with an artist’s enthusiasm. The adult alcove,crowded with nameless horrors, held no visitors. In the farther corner a large niche had beencurtained off, and to this the smiling assistant advanced.

“You must know, Mr. Jones, that the title of this specimen is ‘The Sacrifice to Rhan-Tegoth’.”

Jones started violently, but Orabona appeared not to notice.

“The shapeless, colossal god is a feature in certain obscure legends whichMr. Rogers has studied. All nonsense, of course, as you’ve so often assured Mr. Rogers.It is supposed to have come from outer space, and to have lived in the Arctic three millionyears ago. It treated its sacrifices rather peculiarly and horribly, as you shall see. Mr. Rogershad made it fiendishly life-like—even to the face of the victim.”

Now trembling violently, Jones clung to the brass railing in front of the curtainedniche. He almost reached out to stop Orabona when he saw the curtain beginning to swing aside,but some conflicting impulse held him back. The foreigner smiled triumphantly.

“Behold!”

Jones reeled in spite of his grip on the railing.

“God!—great God!”

Fully ten feet high despite a shambling, crouching attitude expressive of infinitecosmic malignancy, a monstrosity of unbelievable horror was shewn starting forward from a Cyclopeanivory throne covered with grotesque carvings. In the central pair of its six legs it bore acrushed, flattened, distorted, bloodless thing, riddled with a million punctures, and in placesseared as with some pungent acid. Only the mangled head of the victim, lolling upside down atone side, revealed that it represented something once human.

The monster itself needed no title for one who had seen a certain hellish photograph.That damnable print had been all too faithful; yet it could not carry the full horror whichlay in the gigantic actuality. The globular torso—the bubble-like suggestion of a head—thethree fishy eyes—the foot-long proboscis—the bulging gills—the monstrous capillationof asp-like suckers—the six sinuous limbs with their black paws and crab-like claws—God!the familiarity of that black paw ending in a crab-like claw! . . .

Orabona’s smile was utterly damnable. Jones choked, and stared at thehideous exhibit with a mounting fascination which perplexed and disturbed him. What half-revealedhorror was holding and forcing him to look longer and search out details? This had driven Rogersmad . . . Rogers, supreme artist . . . said they weren’t artificial. . . .

Then he localised the thing that held him. It was the crushed waxen victim’slolling head, and something that it implied. This head was not entirely devoid of a face, andthat face was familiar. It was like the mad face of poor Rogers. Jones peered closer, hardlyknowing why he was driven to do so. Wasn’t it natural for a mad egotist to mould his ownfeatures into his masterpiece? Was there anything more that subconscious vision had seized onand suppressed in sheer terror?

The wax of the mangled face had been handled with boundless dexterity. Thosepunctures—how perfectly they reproduced the myriad wounds somehow inflicted on that poordog! But there was something more. On the left cheek one could trace an irregularity which seemedoutside the general scheme—as if the sculptor had sought to cover up a defect of his firstmodelling. The more Jones looked at it, the more mysteriously it horrified him—and then,suddenly, he remembered a circ*mstance which brought his horror to a head. That night of hideousness—thetussle—the bound madman— and the long, deep scratch down the left cheek of the actualliving Rogers. . . .

Jones, releasing his desperate clutch on the railing, sank in a total faint.

Orabona continued to smile.

(Ms. found among the effects of the late Richard H. Johnson, Ph.D., curator of the Cabot Museum of Archaeology, Boston, Mass.)

I.

It is not likely that anyone in Boston—or any alert reader elsewhere—will ever forgetthe strange affair of the Cabot Museum. The newspaper publicity given to that hellish mummy,the antique and terrible rumours vaguely linked with it, the morbid wave of interest and cultactivities during 1932, and the frightful fate of the two intruders on December 1st of thatyear, all combined to form one of those classic mysteries which go down for generations as folkloreand become the nuclei of whole cycles of horrific speculation.

Everyone seems to realise, too, that something very vital and unutterably hideouswas suppressed in the public accounts of the culminant horrors. Those first disquieting hintsas to the condition of one of the two bodies were dismissed and ignored tooabruptly—nor were the singular modifications in the mummy given the following-up whichtheir news value would normally prompt. It also struck people as queer that the mummy was neverrestored to its case. In these days of expert taxidermy the excuse that its disintegratingcondition made exhibition impracticable seemed a peculiarly lame one.

As curator of the museum I am in a position to reveal all the suppressed facts,but this I shall not do during my lifetime. There are things about the world and universe whichit is better for the majority not to know, and I have not departed from the opinion in whichall of us—museum staff, physicians, reporters, and police—concurred at the periodof the horror itself. At the same time it seems proper that a matter of such overwhelming scientificand historic importance should not remain wholly unrecorded—hence this account which Ihave prepared for the benefit of serious students. I shall place it among various papers tobe examined after my death, leaving its fate to the discretion of my executors. Certain threatsand unusual events during the past weeks have led me to believe that my life—as well asthat of other museum officials—is in some peril through the enmity of several widespreadsecret cults of Asiatics, Polynesians, and heterogeneous mystical devotees; hence it is possiblethat the work of the executors may not be long postponed. (Executor’s note: Dr. Johnsondied suddenly and rather mysteriously of heart-failure on April 22, 1933. Wentworth Moore, taxidermistof the museum, disappeared around the middle of the preceding month. On February 18 of the sameyear Dr. William Minot, who superintended a dissection connected with the case, was stabbedin the back, dying the following day.)

The real beginning of the horror, I suppose, was in 1879—long before myterm as curator—when the museum acquired that ghastly, inexplicable mummy from the OrientShipping Company. Its very discovery was monstrous and menacing, for it came from a crypt ofunknown origin and fabulous antiquity on a bit of land suddenly upheaved from the Pacific’sfloor.

On May 11, 1878, Capt. Charles Weatherbee of the freighter Eridanus,bound from Wellington, New Zealand, to Valparaiso, Chile, had sighted a new island unmarkedon any chart and evidently of volcanic origin. It projected quite boldly out of the sea in theform of a truncated cone. A landing-party under Capt. Weatherbee noted evidences of long submersionon the rugged slopes which they climbed, while at the summit there were signs of recent destruction,as by an earthquake. Among the scattered rubble were massive stones of manifestly artificialshaping, and a little examination disclosed the presence of some of that prehistoric Cyclopeanmasonry found on certain Pacific islands and forming a perpetual archaeological puzzle.

Finally the sailors entered a massive stone crypt—judged to have beenpart of a much larger edifice, and to have originally lain far underground—in one cornerof which the frightful mummy crouched. After a short period of virtual panic, caused partlyby certain carvings on the walls, the men were induced to move the mummy to the ship, thoughit was only with fear and loathing that they touched it. Close to the body, as if once thrustinto its clothes, was a cylinder of an unknown metal containing a roll of thin, bluish-whitemembrane of equally unknown nature, inscribed with peculiar characters in a greyish, indeterminablepigment. In the centre of the vast stone floor was a suggestion of a trap-door, but the partylacked apparatus sufficiently powerful to move it.

The Cabot Museum, then newly established, saw the meagre reports of the discoveryand at once took steps to acquire the mummy and the cylinder. Curator Pickman made a personaltrip to Valparaiso and outfitted a schooner to search for the crypt where the thing had beenfound, though meeting with failure in this matter. At the recorded position of the island nothingbut the sea’s unbroken expanse could be discerned, and the seekers realised that the sameseismic forces which had suddenly thrust the island up had carried it down again to the waterydarkness where it had brooded for untold aeons. The secret of that immovable trap-door wouldnever be solved. The mummy and the cylinder, however, remained—and the former was placedon exhibition early in November, 1879, in the museum’s hall of mummies.

The Cabot Museum of Archaeology, which specialises in such remnants of ancientand unknown civilisations as do not fall within the domain of art, is a small and scarcely famousinstitution, though one of high standing in scientific circles. It stands in the heart ofBoston’s exclusive Beacon Hill district—in Mt. Vernon Street, near Joy—housed ina former private mansion with an added wing in the rear, and was a source of pride to its austereneighbours until the recent terrible events brought it an undesirable notoriety.

The hall of mummies on the western side of the original mansion (which wasdesigned by Bulfinch and erected in 1819), on the second floor, is justly esteemed by historiansand anthropologists as harbouring the greatest collection of its kind in America. Here may befound typical examples of Egyptian embalming from the earliest Sakkarah specimens to the lastCoptic attempts of the eighth century; mummies of other cultures, including the prehistoricIndian specimens recently found in the Aleutian Islands; agonised Pompeian figures moulded inplaster from tragic hollows in the ruin-choking ashes; naturally mummified bodies from minesand other excavations in all parts of the earth—some surprised by their terrible entombmentin the grotesque postures caused by their last, tearing death-throes—everything, in short,which any collection of the sort could well be expected to contain. In 1879, of course, it wasmuch less ample than it is now; yet even then it was remarkable. But that shocking thing fromthe primal Cyclopean crypt on an ephemeral sea-spawned island was always its chief attractionand most impenetrable mystery.

The mummy was that of a medium-sized man of unknown race, and was cast in apeculiar crouching posture. The face, half shielded by claw-like hands, had its under jaw thrustfar forward, while the shrivelled features bore an expression of fright so hideous that fewspectators could view them unmoved. The eyes were closed, with lids clamped down tightly overeyeballs apparently bulging and prominent. Bits of hair and beard remained, and the colour ofthe whole was a sort of dull neutral grey. In texture the thing was half leathery and half stony,forming an insoluble enigma to those experts who sought to ascertain how it was embalmed. Inplaces bits of its substance were eaten away by time and decay. Rags of some peculiar fabric,with suggestions of unknown designs, still clung to the object.

Just what made it so infinitely horrible and repulsive one could hardly say.For one thing, there was a subtle, indefinable sense of limitless antiquity and utter alienagewhich affected one like a view from the brink of a monstrous abyss of unplumbed blackness—butmostly it was the expression of crazed fear on the puckered, prognathous, half-shielded face.Such a symbol of infinite, inhuman, cosmic fright could not help communicating the emotion tothe beholder amidst a disquieting cloud of mystery and vain conjecture.

Among the discriminating few who frequented the Cabot Museum this relic ofan elder, forgotten world soon acquired an unholy fame, though the institution’s seclusionand quiet policy prevented it from becoming a popular sensation of the “Cardiff Giant”sort. In the last century the art of vulgar ballyhoo had not invaded the field of scholarshipto the extent it has now succeeded in doing. Naturally, savants of various kinds tried theirbest to classify the frightful object, though always without success. Theories of a bygone Pacificcivilisation, of which the Easter Island images and the megalithic masonry of Ponape and Nan-Matolare conceivable vestiges, were freely circulated among students, and learned journals carriedvaried and often conflicting speculations on a possible former continent whose peaks surviveas the myriad islands of Melanesia and Polynesia. The diversity in dates assigned to the hypotheticalvanished culture—or continent—was at once bewildering and amusing; yet some surprisinglyrelevant allusions were found in certain myths of Tahiti and other islands.

Meanwhile the strange cylinder and its baffling scroll of unknown hieroglyphs,carefully preserved in the museum library, received their due share of attention. No questioncould exist as to their association with the mummy; hence all realised that in the unravellingof their mystery the mystery of the shrivelled horror would in all probability be unravelledas well. The cylinder, about four inches long by seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, was ofa queerly iridescent metal utterly defying chemical analysis and seemingly impervious to allreagents. It was tightly fitted with a cap of the same substance, and bore engraved figuringsof an evidently decorative and possibly symbolic nature—conventional designs which seemedto follow a peculiarly alien, paradoxical, and doubtfully describable system of geometry.

Not less mysterious was the scroll it contained—a neat roll of some thin,bluish-white, unanalysable membrane, coiled round a slim rod of metal like that of the cylinder,and unwinding to a length of some two feet. The large, bold hieroglyphs, extending in a narrowline down the centre of the scroll and penned or painted with a grey pigment defying analysis,resembled nothing known to linguists and palaeographers, and could not be deciphered despitethe transmission of photographic copies to every living expert in the given field.

It is true that a few scholars, unusually versed in the literature of occultismand magic, found vague resemblances between some of the hieroglyphs and certain primal symbolsdescribed or cited in two or three very ancient, obscure, and esoteric texts such as theBook of Eibon, reputed to descend from forgotten Hyperborea; the Pnakotic fragments, allegedto be pre-human; and the monstrous and forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.None of these resemblances, however, was beyond dispute; and because of the prevailing low estimationof occult studies, no effort was made to circulate copies of the hieroglyphs among mysticalspecialists. Had such circulation occurred at this early date, the later history of the casemight have been very different; indeed, a glance at the hieroglyphs by any reader of von Junzt’shorrible Nameless Cults would have established a linkage of unmistakable significance.At this period, however, the readers of that monstrous blasphemy were exceedingly few; copieshaving been incredibly scarce in the interval between the suppression of the original Düsseldorfedition (1839) and of the Bridewell translation (1845) and the publication of the expurgatedreprint by the Golden Goblin Press in 1909. Practically speaking, no occultist or student ofthe primal past’s esoteric lore had his attention called to the strange scroll until therecent outburst of sensational journalism which precipitated the horrible climax.

II.

Thus matters glided along for a half-century following the installation ofthe frightful mummy at the museum. The gruesome object had a local celebrity among cultivatedBostonians, but no more than that; while the very existence of the cylinder and scroll—aftera decade of futile research—was virtually forgotten. So quiet and conservative was theCabot Museum that no reporter or feature writer ever thought of invading its uneventful precinctsfor rabble-tickling material.

The invasion of ballyhoo commenced in the spring of 1931, when a purchase ofsomewhat spectacular nature—that of the strange objects and inexplicably preserved bodiesfound in crypts beneath the almost vanished and evilly famous ruins of Château Faussesflammes,in Averoigne, France—brought the museum prominently into the news columns. True to its“hustling” policy, the Boston Pillar sent a Sunday feature writer to coverthe incident and pad it with an exaggerated general account of the institution itself; and thisyoung man—Stuart Reynolds by name—hit upon the nameless mummy as a potential sensationfar surpassing the recent acquisitions nominally forming his chief assignment. A smatteringof theosophical lore, and a fondness for the speculations of such writers as Colonel Churchwardand Lewis Spence concerning lost continents and primal forgotten civilisations, made Reynoldsespecially alert toward any aeonian relic like the unknown mummy.

At the museum the reporter made himself a nuisance through constant and notalways intelligent questionings and endless demands for the movement of encased objects to permitphotographs from unusual angles. In the basem*nt library room he pored endlessly over the strangemetal cylinder and its membraneous scroll, photographing them from every angle and securingpictures of every bit of the weird hieroglyphed text. He likewise asked to see all books withany bearing whatever on the subject of primal cultures and sunken continents—sitting forthree hours taking notes, and leaving only in order to hasten to Cambridge for a sight (if permissionwere granted) of the abhorred and forbidden Necronomicon at the Widener Library.

On April 5th the article appeared in the Sunday Pillar, smothered inphotographs of mummy, cylinder, and hieroglyphed scroll, and couched in the peculiarly simpering,infantile style which the Pillar affects for the benefit of its vast and mentally immatureclientele. Full of inaccuracies, exaggerations, and sensationalism, it was precisely the sortof thing to stir the brainless and fickle interest of the herd—and as a result the oncequiet museum began to be swarmed with chattering and vacuously staring throngs such as its statelycorridors had never known before.

There were scholarly and intelligent visitors, too, despite the puerility ofthe article—the pictures had spoken for themselves—and many persons of mature attainmentssometimes see the Pillar by accident. I recall one very strange character who appearedduring November—a dark, turbaned, and bushily bearded man with a laboured, unnatural voice,curiously expressionless face, clumsy hands covered with absurd white mittens, who gave a squalidWest End address and called himself “Swami Chandraputra”. This fellow was unbelievablyerudite in occult lore and seemed profoundly and solemnly moved by the resemblance of the hieroglyphson the scroll to certain signs and symbols of a forgotten elder world about which he professedvast intuitive knowledge.

By June, the fame of the mummy and scroll had leaked far beyond Boston, andthe museum had inquiries and requests for photographs from occultists and students of arcanaall over the world. This was not altogether pleasing to our staff, since we are a scientificinstitution without sympathy for fantastic dreamers; yet we answered all questions with civility.One result of these catechisms was a highly learned article in The Occult Review by thefamous New Orleans mystic Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, in which was asserted the complete identityof some of the odd geometrical designs on the iridescent cylinder, and of several of the hieroglyphson the membraneous scroll, with certain ideographs of horrible significance (transcribed fromprimal monoliths or from the secret rituals of hidden bands of esoteric students and devotees)reproduced in the hellish and suppressed Black Book or Nameless Cults of von Junzt.

De Marigny recalled the frightful death of von Junzt in 1840, a year afterthe publication of his terrible volume at Düsseldorf, and commented on his blood-curdling andpartly suspected sources of information. Above all, he emphasised the enormous relevance ofthe tales with which von Junzt linked most of the monstrous ideographs he had reproduced. Thatthese tales, in which a cylinder and scroll were expressly mentioned, held a remarkable suggestionof relationship to the things at the museum, no one could deny; yet they were of such breath-takingextravagance—involving such unbelievable sweeps of time and such fantastic anomalies ofa forgotten elder world—that one could much more easily admire than believe them.

Admire them the public certainly did, for copying in the press was universal.Illustrated articles sprang up everywhere, telling or purporting to tell the legends in theBlack Book, expatiating on the horror of the mummy, comparing the cylinder’s designsand the scroll’s hieroglyphs with the figures reproduced by von Junzt, and indulging inthe wildest, most sensational, and most irrational theories and speculations. Attendance atthe museum was trebled, and the widespread nature of the interest was attested by the plethoraof mail on the subject—most of it inane and superfluous—received at the museum. Apparentlythe mummy and its origin formed—for imaginative people—a close rival to the depressionas chief topic of 1931 and 1932. For my own part, the principal effect of the furore was tomake me read von Junzt’s monstrous volume in the Golden Goblin edition—a perusal whichleft me dizzy and nauseated, yet thankful that I had not seen the utter infamy of the unexpurgatedtext.

III.

The archaic whispers reflected in the Black Book, and linked with designsand symbols so closely akin to what the mysterious scroll and cylinder bore, were indeed ofa character to hold one spellbound and not a little awestruck. Leaping an incredible gulf oftime—behind all the civilisations, races, and lands we know—they clustered round avanished nation and a vanished continent of the misty, fabulous dawn-years . . .that to which legend has given the name of Mu, and which old tablets in the primal Naacal tonguespeak of as flourishing 200,000 years ago, when Europe harboured only hybrid entities, and lostHyperborea knew the nameless worship of black amorphous Tsathoggua.

There was mention of a kingdom or province called K’naa in a very ancientland where the first human people had found monstrous ruins left by those who had dwelt therebefore—vague waves of unknown entities which had filtered down from the stars and livedout their aeons on a forgotten, nascent world. K’naa was a sacred place, since from itsmidst the bleak basalt cliffs of Mount Yaddith-Gho soared starkly into the sky, topped by agigantic fortress of Cyclopean stone, infinitely older than mankind and built by the alien spawnof the dark planet Yuggoth, which had colonised the earth before the birth of terrestrial life.

The spawn of Yuggoth had perished aeons before, but had left behind them onemonstrous and terrible living thing which could never die—their hellish god or patron daemonGhatanothoa, which lowered and brooded eternally though unseen in the crypts beneath that fortresson Yaddith-Gho. No human creature had ever climbed Yaddith-Gho or seen that blasphemous fortressexcept as a distant and geometrically abnormal outline against the sky; yet most agreed thatGhatanothoa was still there, wallowing and burrowing in unsuspected abysses beneath the megalithicwalls. There were always those who believed that sacrifices must be made to Ghatanothoa, lestit crawl out of its hidden abysses and waddle horribly through the world of men as it had oncewaddled through the primal world of the Yuggoth-spawn.

People said that if no victims were offered, Ghatanothoa would ooze up to thelight of day and lumber down the basalt cliffs of Yaddith-Gho bringing doom to all it mightencounter. For no living thing could behold Ghatanothoa, or even a perfect graven image of Ghatanothoa,however small, without suffering a change more horrible than death itself. Sight of the god,or its image, as all the legends of the Yuggoth-spawn agreed, meant paralysis and petrifactionof a singularly shocking sort, in which the victim was turned to stone and leather on the outside,while the brain within remained perpetually alive—horribly fixed and prisoned through theages, and maddeningly conscious of the passage of interminable epochs of helpless inaction tillchance and time might complete the decay of the petrified shell and leave it exposed to die.Most brains, of course, would go mad long before this aeon-deferred release could arrive. Nohuman eyes, it was said, had ever glimpsed Ghatanothoa, though the danger was as great now asit had been for the Yuggoth-spawn.

And so there was a cult in K’naa which worshipped Ghatanothoa and eachyear sacrificed to it twelve young warriors and twelve young maidens. These victims were offeredup on flaming altars in the marble temple near the mountain’s base, for none dared climbYaddith-Gho’s basalt cliffs or draw near to the Cyclopean pre-human stronghold on its crest.Vast was the power of the priests of Ghatanothoa, since upon them alone depended the preservationof K’naa and of all the land of Mu from the petrifying emergence of Ghatanothoa out ofits unknown burrows.

There were in the land an hundred priests of the Dark God, under Imash-Mo theHigh-Priest, who walked before King Thabon at the Nath-feast, and stood proudly whilst the Kingknelt at the Dhoric shrine. Each priest had a marble house, a chest of gold, two hundred slaves,and an hundred concubines, besides immunity from civil law and the power of life and death overall in K’naa save the priests of the King. Yet in spite of these defenders there was evera fear in the land lest Ghatanothoa slither up from the depths and lurch viciously down themountain to bring horror and petrification to mankind. In the latter years the priests forbademen even to guess or imagine what its frightful aspect might be.

It was in the Year of the Red Moon (estimated as B. C. 173,148 by von Junzt)that a human being first dared to breathe defiance against Ghatanothoa and its nameless menace.This bold heretic was T’yog, High-Priest of Shub-Niggurath and guardian of the copper templeof the Goat with a Thousand Young. T’yog had thought long on the powers of the variousgods, and had had strange dreams and revelations touching the life of this and earlier worlds.In the end he felt sure that the gods friendly to man could be arrayed against the hostile gods,and believed that Shub-Niggurath, Nug, and Yeb, as well as Yig the Serpent-god, were ready totake sides with man against the tyranny and presumption of Ghatanothoa.

Inspired by the Mother Goddess, T’yog wrote down a strange formula inthe hieratic Naacal of his order, which he believed would keep the possessor immune from theDark God’s petrifying power. With this protection, he reflected, it might be possible fora bold man to climb the dreaded basalt cliffs and—first of all human beings—enterthe Cyclopean fortress beneath which Ghatanothoa reputedly brooded. Face to face with the god,and with the power of Shub-Niggurath and her sons on his side, T’yog believed that he mightbe able to bring it to terms and at last deliver mankind from its brooding menace. With humanityfreed through his efforts, there would be no limits to the honours he might claim. All the honoursof the priests of Ghatanothoa would perforce be transferred to him; and even kingship or godhoodmight conceivably be within his reach.

So T’yog wrote his protective formula on a scroll of pthagon membrane(according to von Junzt, the inner skin of the extinct yakith-lizard) and enclosed it in a carvencylinder of lagh metal—the metal brought by the Elder Ones from Yuggoth, and foundin no mine of earth. This charm, carried in his robe, would make him proof against the menaceof Ghatanothoa—it would even restore the Dark God’s petrified victims if that monstrousentity should ever emerge and begin its devastations. Thus he proposed to go up the shunnedand man-untrodden mountain, invade the alien-angled citadel of Cyclopean stone, and confrontthe shocking devil-entity in its lair. Of what would follow, he could not even guess; but thehope of being mankind’s saviour lent strength to his will.

He had, however, reckoned without the jealousy and self-interest of Ghatanothoa’spampered priests. No sooner did they hear of his plan than—fearful for their prestige andprivilege in case the Daemon-God should be dethroned—they set up a frantic clamour againstthe so-called sacrilege, crying that no man might prevail against Ghatanothoa, and that anyeffort to seek it out would merely provoke it to a hellish onslaught against mankind which nospell or priestcraft could hope to avert. With those cries they hoped to turn the public mindagainst T’yog; yet such was the people’s yearning for freedom from Ghatanothoa, andsuch their confidence in the skill and zeal of T’yog, that all the protestations came tonaught. Even the King, usually a puppet of the priests, refused to forbid T’yog’sdaring pilgrimage.

It was then that the priests of Ghatanothoa did by stealth what they couldnot do openly. One night Imash-Mo, the High-Priest, stole to T’yog in his temple chamberand took from his sleeping form the metal cylinder; silently drawing out the potent scroll andputting in its place another scroll of great similitude, yet varied enough to have no poweragainst any god or daemon. When the cylinder was slipped back into the sleeper’s cloakImash-Mo was content, for he knew T’yog was little likely to study that cylinder’scontents again. Thinking himself protected by the true scroll, the heretic would march up theforbidden mountain and into the Evil Presence—and Ghatanothoa, unchecked by any magic,would take care of the rest.

It would no longer be needful for Ghatanothoa’s priests to preach againstthe defiance. Let T’yog go his way and meet his doom. And secretly, the priests would alwayscherish the stolen scroll—the true and potent charm—handing it down from one High-Priestto another for use in any dim future when it might be needful to contravene the Devil-God’swill. So the rest of the night Imash-Mo slept in great peace, with the true scroll in a newcylinder fashioned for its harbourage.

It was dawn on the Day of the Sky-Flames (nomenclature undefined by von Junzt)that T’yog, amidst the prayers and chanting of the people and with King Thabon’s blessingon his head, started up the dreaded mountain with a staff of tlath-wood in his right hand. Withinhis robe was the cylinder holding what he thought to be the true charm—for he had indeedfailed to find out the imposture. Nor did he see any irony in the prayers which Imash-Mo andthe other priests of Ghatanothoa intoned for his safety and success.

All that morning the people stood and watched as T’yog’s dwindlingform struggled up the shunned basalt slope hitherto alien to men’s footsteps, and manystayed watching long after he had vanished where a perilous ledge led round to the mountain’shidden side. That night a few sensitive dreamers thought they heard a faint tremor convulsingthe hated peak; though most ridiculed them for the statement. Next day vast crowds watched themountain and prayed, and wondered how soon T’yog would return. And so the next day, andthe next. For weeks they hoped and waited, and then they wept. Nor did anyone ever see T’yog,who would have saved mankind from fears, again.

Thereafter men shuddered at T’yog’s presumption, and tried not tothink of the punishment his impiety had met. And the priests of Ghatanothoa smiled to thosewho might resent the god’s will or challenge its right to the sacrifices. In later yearsthe ruse of Imash-Mo became known to the people; yet the knowledge availed not to change thegeneral feeling that Ghatanothoa were better left alone. None ever dared to defy it again. Andso the ages rolled on, and King succeeded King, and High-Priest succeeded High-Priest, and nationsrose and decayed, and lands rose above the sea and returned into the sea. And with many millenniadecay fell upon K’naa—till at last on a hideous day of storm and thunder, terrificrumbling, and mountain-high waves, all the land of Mu sank into the sea forever.

Yet down the later aeons thin streams of ancient secrets trickled. In distantlands there met together grey-faced fugitives who had survived the sea-fiend’s rage, andstrange skies drank the smoke of altars reared to vanished gods and daemons. Though none knewto what bottomless deep the sacred peak and Cyclopean fortress of dreaded Ghatanothoa had sunk,there were still those who mumbled its name and offered to it nameless sacrifices lest it bubbleup through leagues of ocean and shamble among men spreading horror and petrifaction.

Around the scattered priests grew the rudiments of a dark and secret cult—secretbecause the people of the new lands had other gods and devils, and thought only evil of elderand alien ones—and within that cult many hideous things were done, and many strange objectscherished. It was whispered that a certain line of elusive priests still harboured the truecharm against Ghatanothoa which Imash-Mo stole from the sleeping T’yog; though none remainedwho could read or understand the cryptic syllables, or who could even guess in what part ofthe world the lost K’naa, the dreaded peak of Yaddith-Gho, and the titan fortress of theDevil-God had lain.

Though it flourished chiefly in those Pacific regions around which Mu itselfhad once stretched, there were rumours of the hidden and detested cult of Ghatanothoa in ill-fatedAtlantis, and on the abhorred plateau of Leng. Von Junzt implied its presence in the fabledsubterrene kingdom of K’n-yan, and gave clear evidence that it had penetrated Egypt, Chaldaea,Persia, China, the forgotten Semite empires of Africa, and Mexico and Peru in the New World.That it had a strong connexion with the witchcraft movement in Europe, against which the bullsof popes were vainly directed, he more than strongly hinted. The West, however, was never favourableto its growth; and public indignation—aroused by glimpses of hideous rites and namelesssacrifices—wholly stamped out many of its branches. In the end it became a hunted, doublyfurtive underground affair—yet never could its nucleus be quite exterminated. It alwayssurvived somehow, chiefly in the Far East and on the Pacific Islands, where its teachings becamemerged into the esoteric lore of the Polynesian Areoi.

Von Junzt gave subtle and disquieting hints of actual contact with the cult;so that as I read I shuddered at what was rumoured about his death. He spoke of the growth ofcertain ideas regarding the appearance of the Devil-God—a creature which no human being(unless it were the too-daring T’yog, who had never returned) had ever seen—and contrastedthis habit of speculation with the taboo prevailing in ancient Mu against any attempt to imaginewhat the horror looked like. There was a peculiar fearfulness about the devotees’ awedand fascinated whispers on this subject—whispers heavy with morbid curiosity concerningthe precise nature of what T’yog might have confronted in that frightful pre-human edificeon the dreaded and now-sunken mountains before the end (if it was an end) finally came—andI felt oddly disturbed by the German scholar’s oblique and insidious references to thistopic.

Scarcely less disturbing were von Junzt’s conjectures on the whereaboutsof the stolen scroll of cantrips against Ghatanothoa, and on the ultimate uses to which thisscroll might be put. Despite all my assurance that the whole matter was purely mythical, I couldnot help shivering at the notion of a latter-day emergence of the monstrous god, and at thepicture of an humanity turned suddenly to a race of abnormal statues, each encasing a livingbrain doomed to inert and helpless consciousness for untold aeons of futurity. The old Düsseldorfsavant had a poisonous way of suggesting more than he stated, and I could understand why hisdamnable book was suppressed in so many countries as blasphemous, dangerous, and unclean.

I writhed with repulsion, yet the thing exerted an unholy fascination; andI could not lay it down till I had finished it. The alleged reproductions of designs and ideographsfrom Mu were marvellously and startlingly like the markings on the strange cylinder and thecharacters on the scroll, and the whole account teemed with details having vague, irritatingsuggestions of resemblance to things connected with the hideous mummy. The cylinder and scroll—thePacific setting—the persistent notion of old Capt. Weatherbee that the Cyclopean cryptwhere the mummy was found had once lain under a vast building . . . somehow Iwas vaguely glad that the volcanic island had sunk before that massive suggestion of a trap-doorcould be opened.

IV.

What I read in the Black Book formed a fiendishly apt preparation forthe news items and closer events which began to force themselves upon me in the spring of 1932.I can scarcely recall just when the increasingly frequent reports of police action against theodd and fantastical religious cults in the Orient and elsewhere commenced to impress me; butby May or June I realised that there was, all over the world, a surprising and unwonted burstof activity on the part of bizarre, furtive, and esoteric mystical organisations ordinarilyquiescent and seldom heard from.

It is not likely that I would have connected these reports with either thehints of von Junzt or the popular furore over the mummy and cylinder in the museum, but forcertain significant syllables and persistent resemblances—sensationally dwelt upon by thepress—in the rites and speeches of the various secret celebrants brought to public attention.As it was, I could not help remarking with disquiet the frequent recurrence of a name—invarious corrupt forms—which seemed to constitute a focal point of all the cult worship,and which was obviously regarded with a singular mixture of reverence and terror. Some of theforms quoted were G’tanta, Tanotah, Than-Tha, Gatan, and Ktan-Tah—and it did not requirethe suggestions of my now numerous occultist correspondents to make me see in these variantsa hideous and suggestive kinship to the monstrous name rendered by von Junzt as Ghatanothoa.

There were other disquieting features, too. Again and again the reports citedvague, awestruck references to a “true scroll” —something on which tremendousconsequences seemed to hinge, and which was mentioned as being in the custody of a certain “Nagob”,whoever and whatever he might be. Likewise, there was an insistent repetition of a name whichsounded like Tog, Tiok, Yog, Zob, or Yob, and which my more and more excited consciousness involuntarilylinked with the name of the hapless heretic T’yog as given in the Black Book. Thisname was usually uttered in connexion with such cryptical phrases as “It is none otherthan he”, “He had looked upon its face”, “He knows all, though he can neithersee nor feel”, “He has brought the memory down through the aeons”, “Thetrue scroll will release him”, “Nagob has the true scroll”,“He can tell where to find it”.

Something very queer was undoubtedly in the air, and I did not wonder whenmy occultist correspondents, as well as the sensational Sunday papers, began to connect thenew abnormal stirrings with the legends of Mu on the one hand, and with the frightful mummy’srecent exploitation on the other hand. The widespread articles in the first wave of press publicity,with their insistent linkage of the mummy, cylinder, and scroll with the tale in the BlackBook, and their crazily fantastic speculations about the whole matter, might very well haveroused the latent fanaticism in hundreds of those furtive groups of exotic devotees with whichour complex world abounds. Nor did the papers cease adding fuel to the flames—for the storieson the cult-stirrings were even wilder than the earlier series of yarns.

As the summer drew on, attendants noticed a curious new element among the throngsof visitors which—after a lull following the first burst of publicity—were again drawnto the museum by the second furore. More and more frequently there were persons of strange andexotic aspect—swarthy Asiatics, long-haired nondescripts, and bearded brown men who seemedunused to European clothes—who would invariably inquire for the hall of mummies and wouldsubsequently be found staring at the hideous Pacific specimen in a veritable ecstasy of fascination.Some quiet, sinister undercurrent in this flood of eccentric foreigners seemed to impress allthe guards, and I myself was far from undisturbed. I could not help thinking of the prevailingcult-stirrings among just such exotics as these—and the connexion of those stirrings withmyths all too close to the frightful mummy and its cylinder scroll.

At times I was half tempted to withdraw the mummy from exhibition—especiallywhen an attendant told me that he had several times glimpsed strangers making odd obeisancesbefore it, and had overheard sing-song mutterings which sounded like chants or rituals addressedto it at hours when the visiting throngs were somewhat thinned. One of the guards acquired aqueer nervous hallucination about the petrified horror in the lone glass case, alleging thathe could see from day to day certain vague, subtle, and infinitely slight changes in the franticflexion of the bony claws, and in the fear-crazed expression of the leathery face. He couldnot get rid of the loathsome idea that those horrible, bulging eyes were about to pop suddenlyopen.

It was early in September, when the curious crowds had lessened and the hallof mummies was sometimes vacant, that the attempt to get at the mummy by cutting the glass ofits case was made. The culprit, a swarthy Polynesian, was spied in time by a guard, and wasoverpowered before any damage occurred. Upon investigation the fellow turned out to be an Hawaiiannotorious for his activity in certain underground religious cults, and having a considerablepolice record in connexion with abnormal and inhuman rites and sacrifices. Some of the papersfound in his room were highly puzzling and disturbing, including many sheets covered with hieroglyphsclosely resembling those on the scroll at the museum and in the Black Book of von Junzt;but regarding these things he could not be prevailed upon to speak.

Scarcely a week after this incident, another attempt to get at the mummy—thistime by tampering with the lock of his case—resulted in a second arrest. The offender,a Cingalese, had as long and unsavoury a record of loathsome cult activities as the Hawaiianhad possessed, and displayed a kindred unwillingness to talk to the police. What made this casedoubly and darkly interesting was that a guard had noticed this man several times before, andhad heard him addressing to the mummy a peculiar chant containing unmistakable repetitions ofthe word “T’yog”. As a result of this affair I doubled the guards in the hallof mummies, and ordered them never to leave the now notorious specimen out of sight, even fora moment.

As may well be imagined, the press made much of these two incidents, reviewingits talk of primal and fabulous Mu, and claiming boldly that the hideous mummy was none otherthan the daring heretic T’yog, petrified by something he had seen in the pre-human citadelhe had invaded, and preserved intact through 175,000 years of our planet’s turbulent history.That the strange devotees represented cults descended from Mu, and that they were worshippingthe mummy—or perhaps even seeking to awaken it to life by spells and incantations—wasemphasised and reiterated in the most sensational fashion.

Writers exploited the insistence of the old legends that the brain ofGhatanothoa’s petrified victims remained conscious and unaffected—a point which servedas a basis for the wildest and most improbable speculations. The mention of a “true scroll”also received due attention—it being the prevailing popular theory that T’yog’sstolen charm against Ghatanothoa was somewhere in existence, and that cult-members were tryingto bring it into contact with T’yog himself for some purpose of their own. One result ofthis exploitation was that a third wave of gaping visitors began flooding the museum and staringat the hellish mummy which served as a nucleus for the whole strange and disturbing affair.

It was among this wave of spectators—many of whom made repeated visits—thattalk of the mummy’s vaguely changing aspect first began to be widespread. I suppose—despitethe disturbing notion of the nervous guard some months before—that the museum’s personnelwas too well used to the constant sight of odd shapes to pay close attention to details; inany case, it was the excited whispers of visitors which at length aroused the guards to thesubtle mutation which was apparently in progress. Almost simultaneously the press got hold ofit—with blatant results which can well be imagined.

Naturally, I gave the matter my most careful observation, and by the middleof October decided that a definite disintegration of the mummy was under way. Through some chemicalor physical influence in the air, the half-stony, half-leathery fibres seemed to be graduallyrelaxing, causing distinct variations in the angles of the limbs and in certain details of thefear-twisted facial expression. After a half-century of perfect preservation this was a highlydisconcerting development, and I had the museum’s taxidermist, Dr. Moore, go carefullyover the gruesome object several times. He reported a general relaxation and softening, andgave the thing two or three astringent sprayings, but did not dare to attempt anything drasticlest there be a sudden crumbling and accelerated decay.

The effect of all this upon the gaping crowds was curious. Heretofore eachnew sensation sprung by the press had brought fresh waves of staring and whispering visitors,but now—though the papers blathered endlessly about the mummy’s changes—the publicseemed to have acquired a definite sense of fear which outranked even its morbid curiosity.People seemed to feel that a sinister aura hovered over the museum, and from a high peak theattendance fell to a level distinctly below normal. This lessened attendance gave added prominenceto the stream of freakish foreigners who continued to infest the place, and whose numbers seemedin no way diminished.

On November 18th a Peruvian of Indian blood suffered a strange hysterical orepileptic seizure in front of the mummy, afterward shrieking from his hospital cot, “Ittried to open its eyes!—T’yog tried to open his eyes and stare at me!” I wasby this time on the point of removing the object from exhibition, but permitted myself to beoverruled at a meeting of our very conservative directors. However, I could see that the museumwas beginning to acquire an unholy reputation in its austere and quiet neighbourhood. Afterthis incident I gave instructions that no one be allowed to pause before the monstrous Pacificrelic for more than a few minutes at a time.

It was on November 24th, after the museum’s five o’clock closing,that one of the guards noticed a minute opening of the mummy’s eyes. The phenomenon wasvery slight—nothing but a thin crescent of cornea being visible in either eye—butit was none the less of the highest interest. Dr. Moore, having been summoned hastily, was aboutto study the exposed bits of eyeball with a magnifier when his handling of the mummy causedthe leathery lids to fall tightly shut again. All gentle efforts to open them failed, and thetaxidermist did not dare to apply drastic measures. When he notified me of all this by telephoneI felt a sense of mounting dread hard to reconcile with the apparently simple event concerned.For a moment I could share the popular impression that some evil, amorphous blight from unplumbeddeeps of time and space hung murkily and menacingly over the museum.

Two nights later a sullen Filipino was trying to secrete himself in the museumat closing time. Arrested and taken to the station, he refused even to give his name, and wasdetained as a suspicious person. Meanwhile the strict surveillance of the mummy seemed to discouragethe odd hordes of foreigners from haunting it. At least, the number of exotic visitors distinctlyfell off after the enforcement of the “move along” order.

It was during the early morning hours of Thursday, December 1st, that a terribleclimax developed. At about one o’clock horrible screams of mortal fright and agony wereheard issuing from the museum, and a series of frantic telephone calls from neighbours broughtto the scene quickly and simultaneously a squad of police and several museum officials, includingmyself. Some of the policemen surrounded the building while others, with the officials, cautiouslyentered. In the main corridor we found the night watchman strangled to death—a bit of EastIndian hemp still knotted around his neck—and realised that despite all precautions somedarkly evil intruder or intruders had gained access to the place. Now, however, a tomb-likesilence enfolded everything and we almost feared to advance upstairs to the fateful wing wherewe knew the core of the trouble must lurk. We felt a bit more steadied after flooding the buildingwith light from the central switches in the corridor, and finally crept reluctantly up the curvingstaircase and through a lofty archway to the hall of mummies.

V.

It is from this point onward that reports of the hideous case have been censored—forwe have all agreed that no good can be accomplished by a public knowledge of those terrestrialconditions implied by the further developments. I have said that we flooded the whole buildingwith light before our ascent. Now beneath the beams that beat down on the glistening cases andtheir gruesome contents, we saw outspread a mute horror whose baffling details testified tohappenings utterly beyond our comprehension. There were two intruders—who we afterwardagreed must have hidden in the building before closing time—but they would never be executedfor the watchman’s murder. They had already paid the penalty.

One was a Burmese and the other a Fiji-Islander—both known to the policefor their share in frightful and repulsive cult activities. They were dead, and the more weexamined them the more utterly monstrous and unnamable we felt their manner of death to be.On both faces was a more wholly frantic and inhuman look of fright than even the oldest policemanhad ever seen before; yet in the state of the two bodies there were vast and significant differences.

The Burmese lay collapsed close to the nameless mummy’s case, from whicha square of glass had been neatly cut. In his right hand was a scroll of bluish membrane whichI at once saw was covered with greyish hieroglyphs—almost a duplicate of the scroll inthe strange cylinder in the library downstairs, though later study brought out subtle differences.There was no mark of violence on the body, and in view of the desperate, agonised expressionon the twisted face we could only conclude that the man died of sheer fright.

It was the closely adjacent Fijian, though, that gave us the profoundest shock.One of the policemen was the first to feel of him, and the cry of fright he emitted added anothershudder to that neighbourhood’s night of terror. We ought to have known from the lethalgreyness of the once-black, fear-twisted face, and of the bony hands—one of which stillclutched an electric torch—that something was hideously wrong; yet every one of us wasunprepared for what that officer’s hesitant touch disclosed. Even now I can think of itonly with a paroxysm of dread and repulsion. To be brief—the hapless invader, who lessthan an hour before had been a sturdy living Melanesian bent on unknown evils, was now a rigid,ash-grey figure of stony, leathery petrification, in every respect identical with the crouching,aeon-old blasphemy in the violated glass case.

Yet that was not the worst. Crowning all other horrors, and indeed seizingour shocked attention before we turned to the bodies on the floor, was the state of the frightfulmummy. No longer could its changes be called vague and subtle, for it had now made radical shiftsof posture. It had sagged and slumped with a curious loss of rigidity; its bony claws had sunkuntil they no longer even partly covered its leathery, fear-crazed face; and—God help us!— itshellish bulging eyes had popped wide open, and seemed to be staring directly at the two intruderswho had died of fright or worse.

That ghastly, dead-fish stare was hideously mesmerising, and it haunted usall the time we were examining the bodies of the invaders. Its effect on our nerves was damnablyqueer, for we somehow felt a curious rigidity creeping over us and hampering our simplest motions—arigidity which later vanished very oddly when we passed the hieroglyphed scroll around for inspection.Every now and then I felt my gaze drawn irresistibly toward those horrible bulging eyes in thecase, and when I returned to study them after viewing the bodies I thought I detected somethingvery singular about the glassy surface of the dark and marvellously well-preserved pupils. Themore I looked, the more fascinated I became; and at last I went down to the office—despitethat strange stiffness in my limbs—and brought up a strong multiple magnifying glass. Withthis I commenced a very close and careful survey of the fishy pupils, while the others crowdedexpectantly around.

I had always been rather sceptical of the theory that scenes and objects becomephotographed on the retina of the eye in cases of death or coma; yet no sooner did I look throughthe lens than I realised the presence of some sort of image other than the room’s reflectionin the glassy, bulging optics of this nameless spawn of the aeons. Certainly, there was a dimlyoutlined scene on the age-old retinal surface, and I could not doubt that it formed the lastthing on which those eyes had looked in life—countless millennia ago. It seemed to be steadilyfading, and I fumbled with the magnifier in order to shift another lens into place. Yet it musthave been accurate and clear-cut, even if infinitesimally small, when—in response to someevil spell or act connected with their visit—it had confronted those intruders who werefrightened to death. With the extra lens I could make out many details formerly invisible, andthe awed group around me hung on the flood of words with which I tried to tell what I saw.

For here, in the year 1932, a man in the city of Boston was looking on somethingwhich belonged to an unknown and utterly alien world—a world that vanished from existenceand normal memory aeons ago. There was a vast room—a chamber of Cyclopean masonry—andI seemed to be viewing it from one of its corners. On the walls were carvings so hideous thateven in this imperfect image their stark blasphemousness and bestial*ty sickened me. I couldnot believe that the carvers of these things were human, or that they had ever seen human beingswhen they shaped the frightful outlines which leered at the beholder. In the centre of the chamberwas a colossal trap-door of stone, pushed upward to permit the emergence of some object frombelow. The object should have been clearly visible—indeed, must have been when the eyesfirst opened before the fear-stricken intruders—though under my lenses it was merely amonstrous blur.

As it happened, I was studying the right eye only when I brought the extramagnification into play. A moment later I wished fervently that my search had ended there. Asit was, however, the zeal of discovery and revelation was upon me, and I shifted my powerfullenses to the mummy’s left eye in the hope of finding the image less faded on that retina.My hands, trembling with excitement and unnaturally stiff from some obscure influence, wereslow in bringing the magnifier into focus, but a moment later I realised that the image wasless faded than in the other eye. I saw in a morbid flash of half-distinctness the insufferablething which was welling up through the prodigious trap-door in that Cyclopean, immemoriallyarchaic crypt of a lost world—and fell fainting with an inarticulate shriek of which Iam not even ashamed.

By the time I revived there was no distinct image of anything in either eyeof the monstrous mummy. Sergeant Keefe of the police looked with my glass, for I could not bringmyself to face that abnormal entity again. And I thanked all the powers of the cosmos that Ihad not looked earlier than I did. It took all my resolution, and a great deal of solicitation,to make me relate what I had glimpsed in the hideous moment of revelation. Indeed, I could notspeak till we had all adjourned to the office below, out of sight of that daemoniac thing whichcould not be. For I had begun to harbour the most terrible and fantastic notions about the mummyand its glassy, bulging eyes—that it had a kind of hellish consciousness, seeing all thatoccurred before it and trying vainly to communicate some frightful message from the gulfs oftime. That meant madness—but at last I thought I might be better off if I told what Ihad half seen.

After all, it was not a long thing to tell. Oozing and surging up out of thatyawning trap-door in the Cyclopean crypt I had glimpsed such an unbelievable behemothic monstrositythat I could not doubt the power of its original to kill with its mere sight. Even now I cannotbegin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call itgigantic—tentacled—proboscidian—octopus-eyed—semi-amorphous—plastic—partlysquamous and partly rugose—ugh! But nothing I could say could even adumbrate the loathsome,unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbiddenspawn of black chaos and illimitable night. As I write these words the associated mental imagecauses me to lean back faint and nauseated. As I told of the sight to the men around me in theoffice, I had to fight to preserve the consciousness I had regained.

Nor were my hearers much less moved. Not a man spoke above a whisper for afull quarter-hour, and there were awed, half-furtive references to the frightful lore in theBlack Book, to the recent newspaper tales of cult-stirrings, and to the sinister eventsin the museum. Ghatanothoa . . . Even its smallest perfect image could petrify—T’yog—thefalse scroll—he never came back—the true scroll which could fully or partly undo thepetrification—did it survive?—the hellish cults—the phrases overheard— “Itis none other than he”–“He had looked upon its face”–“He knowsall, though he can neither see nor feel”–“He had brought the memory down throughthe aeons”–“The true scroll will release him”–“Nagob has the truescroll”–“He can tell where to find it.”Only the healing greyness of the dawn brought us back to sanity; a sanity which made of that glimpse of mine a closed topic—somethingnot to be explained or thought of again.

We gave out only partial reports to the press, and later on coöperatedwith the papers in making other suppressions. For example, when the autopsy shewed the brainand several other internal organs of the petrified Fijian to be fresh and unpetrified, thoughhermetically sealed by the petrification of the exterior flesh—an anomaly about which physiciansare still guardedly and bewilderedly debating—we did not wish a furore to be started. Weknew too well what the yellow journals, remembering what was said of the intact-brained andstill-conscious state of Ghatanothoa’s stony-leathery victims, would make of this detail.

As matters stood, they pointed out that the man who had held the hieroglyphedscroll—and who had evidently thrust it at the mummy through the opening in the case—wasnot petrified, while the man who had not held it was. When they demanded that we makecertain experiments—applying the scroll both to the stony-leathery body of the Fijian andto the mummy itself—we indignantly refused to abet such superstitious notions. Of course,the mummy was withdrawn from public view and transferred to the museum laboratory awaiting areally scientific examination before some suitable medical authority. Remembering past events,we kept it under a strict guard; but even so, an attempt was made to enter the museum at 2:25a.m. on December 5th. Prompt working of the burglar alarm frustrated the design, though unfortunatelythe criminal or criminals escaped.

That no hint of anything further ever reached the public, I am profoundly thankful.I wish devoutly that there were nothing more to tell. There will, of course, be leaks, and ifanything happens to me I do not know what my executors will do with this manuscript; but atleast the case will not be painfully fresh in the multitude’s memory when the revelationcomes. Besides, no one will believe the facts when they are finally told. That is the curiousthing about the multitude. When their yellow press makes hints, they are ready to swallow anything;but when a stupendous and abnormal revelation is actually made, they laugh it aside as a lie.For the sake of general sanity it is probably better so.

I have said that a scientific examination of the frightful mummy was planned.This took place on December 8th, exactly a week after the hideous culmination of events, andwas conducted by the eminent Dr. William Minot, in conjunction with Wentworth Moore, Sc.D.,taxidermist of the museum. Dr. Minot had witnessed the autopsy of the oddly petrified Fijianthe week before. There were also present Messrs. Lawrence Cabot and Dudley Saltonstall of themuseum’s trustees, Drs. Mason, Wells, and Carver of the museum staff, two representativesof the press, and myself. During the week the condition of the hideous specimen had not visiblychanged, though some relaxation of its fibres caused the position of the glassy, open eyes toshift slightly from time to time. All of the staff dreaded to look at the thing—for itssuggestion of quiet, conscious watching had become intolerable—and it was only with aneffort that I could bring myself to attend the examination.

Dr. Minot arrived shortly after 1:00 p.m., and within a few minutes began hissurvey of the mummy. Considerable disintegration took place under his hands, and in view ofthis—and of what we told him concerning the gradual relaxation of the specimen since thefirst of October—he decided that a thorough dissection ought to be made before the substancewas further impaired. The proper instruments being present in the laboratory equipment, he beganat once; exclaiming aloud at the odd, fibrous nature of the grey, mummified substance.

But his exclamation was still louder when he made the first deep incision,for out of that cut there slowly trickled a thick crimson stream whose nature—despite theinfinite ages dividing this hellish mummy’s lifetime from the present—was utterlyunmistakable. A few more deft strokes revealed various organs in astonishing degrees of non-petrifiedpreservation—all, indeed, being intact except where injuries to the petrified exteriorhad brought about malformation or destruction. The resemblance of this condition to that foundin the fright-killed Fiji-Islander was so strong that the eminent physician gasped in bewilderment.The perfection of those ghastly bulging eyes was uncanny, and their exact state with respectto petrification was very difficult to determine.

At 3:30 p.m. the brain-case was opened—and ten minutes later our stunnedgroup took an oath of secrecy which only such guarded documents as this manuscript will evermodify. Even the two reporters were glad to confirm the silence. For the opening had revealeda pulsing, living brain.

I.

Southeast of Hampden, near the tortuous Salmon River gorge, is a range of steep, rocky hillswhich have defied all efforts of sturdy homesteaders. The canyons are too deep and the slopestoo precipitous to encourage anything save seasonal livestock grazing. The last time I visitedHampden the region—known as Hell’s Acres—was part of the Blue Mountain ForestReserve. There are no roads linking this inaccessible locality with the outside world, and thehillfolk will tell you that it is indeed a spot transplanted from his Satanic Majesty’sfront yard. There is a local superstition that the area is haunted—but by what or by whomno one seems to know. Natives will not venture within its mysterious depths, for they believethe stories handed down to them by the Nez Perce Indians, who have shunned the region for untoldgenerations, because, according to them, it is a playground of certain giant devils from theOutside. These suggestive tales made me very curious.

My first excursion—and my last, thank God!—into those hills occurredwhile Constantine Theunis and I were living in Hampden the summer of 1938. He was writing atreatise on Egyptian mythology, and I found myself alone much of the time, despite the factthat we shared a modest cabin on Beacon Street, within sight of the infamous Pirate House, builtby Exer Jones over sixty years ago.

The morning of June 23rd found me walking in those oddly shaped hills, whichhad, since seven o’clock, seemed very ordinary indeed. I must have been about seven milessouth of Hampden before I noticed anything unusual. I was climbing a grassy ridge overlookinga particularly deep canyon, when I came upon an area totally devoid of the usual bunch-grassand greaseweed. It extended southward, over numerous hills and valleys. At first I thought thespot had been burned over the previous fall, but upon examining the turf, I found no signs ofa blaze. The nearby slopes and ravines looked terribly scarred and seared, as if some gigantictorch had blasted them, wiping away all vegetation. And yet there was no evidence of fire. . . .

I moved on over rich, black soil in which no grass flourished. As I headedfor the approximate center of this desolate area, I began to notice a strange silence. Therewere no larks, no rabbits, and even the insects seemed to have deserted the place. I gainedthe summit of a lofty knoll and tried to guess at the size of that bleak, inexplicable region.Then I saw the lone tree.

It stood on a hill somewhat higher than its companions, and attracted the eyebecause it was so utterly unexpected. I had seen no trees for miles: thorn and hackberry bushesclustered the shallower ravines, but there had been no mature trees. Strange to find one standingon the crest of the hill.

I crossed two steep canyons before I came to it; and a surprise awaited me.It was not a pine tree, nor a fir tree, nor a hackberry tree. I had never, in all my life, seenone to compare with it—and I never have to this day, for which I am eternally thankful!

More than anything it resembled an oak. It had a huge, twisted trunk, fullya yard in diameter, and the large limbs began spreading outward scarcely seven feet from theground. The leaves were round, and curiously alike in size and design. It might have been atree painted on a canvas, but I will swear that it was real. I shall always know that itwas real, despite what Theunis said later.

I recall that I glanced at the sun and judged the time to be about ten o’clocka.m., although I did not look at my watch. The day was becoming warm, and I sat for a whilein the welcome shade of the huge tree. Then I regarded the rank grass that flourished beneathit—another singular phenomenon when I remembered the bleak terrain through which I hadpassed. A wild maze of hills, ravines, and bluffs hemmed me in on all sides, although the riseon which I sat was rather higher than any other within miles. I looked far to the east—andI jumped to my feet, startled and amazed. Shimmering through a blue haze of distance were theBitterroot Mountains! There is no other range of snow-capped peaks within three hundred milesof Hampden; and I knew—at this altitude—that I shouldn’t be seeing them at all.For several minutes I gazed at the marvel; then I became drowsy. I lay in the rank grass, beneaththe tree. I unstrapped my camera, took off my hat, and relaxed, staring skyward through thegreen leaves. I closed my eyes.

Then a curious phenomenon began to assail me—a vague, cloudy sort of vision—glimpsingor day-dreaming seemingly without relevance to anything familiar. I thought I saw a great templeby a sea of ooze, where three suns gleamed in a pale red sky. The vast tomb, or temple, wasan anomalous color—a nameless blue-violet shade. Large beasts flew in the cloudy sky, andI seemed to hear the pounding of their scaly wings. I went nearer the stone temple, and a hugedoorway loomed in front of me. Within that portal were swirling shadows that seemed to dart andleer and try to snatch me inside that awful darkness. I thought I saw three flaming eyes inthe shifting void of a doorway, and I screamed with mortal fear. In that noisome depth, I knew,lurked utter destruction—a living hell even worse than death. I screamed again. The visionfaded.

I saw the round leaves and the sane earthly sky. I struggled to rise. I wastrembling; cold perspiration beaded my brow. I had a mad impulse to flee; run insanely fromthat sinister tree on the hill—but I checked the absurd intuition and sat down, tryingto collect my senses. Never had I dreamed anything so realistic; so horrifying. What had causedthe vision? I had been reading several of Theunis’ tomes on ancient Egypt. . . .I mopped my forehead, and decided that it was time for lunch. But I did not feel like eating.

Then I had an inspiration. I would take a few snapshots of the tree, for Theunis.They might shock him out of his habitual air of unconcern. Perhaps I would tell him about thedream. . . . Opening my camera, I took half a dozen shots of the tree, and everyaspect of the landscape as seen from the tree. Also, I included one of the gleaming, snow-crestedpeaks. I might want to return, and these photos would help. . . .

Folding the camera, I returned to my cushion of soft grass. Had that spot beneaththe tree a certain alien enchantment? I know that I was reluctant to leave it. . . .

I gazed upward at the curious round leaves. I closed my eyes. A breeze stirredthe branches, and their whispered music lulled me into tranquil oblivion. And suddenly I sawagain the pale red sky and the three suns. The land of three shadows! Again the great templecame into view. I seemed to be floating on the air—a disembodied spirit exploring the wondersof a mad, multi-dimensional world! The temple’s oddly angled cornices frightened me, andI knew that this place was one that no man on earth had ever seen in his wildest dreams.

Again the vast doorway yawned before me; and I was sucked within that black,writhing cloud. I seemed to be staring at space unlimited. I saw a void beyond my vocabularyto describe; a dark, bottomless gulf teeming with nameless shapes and entities—things ofmadness and delirium, as tenuous as a mist from Shamballah.

My soul shrank. I was terribly afraid. I screamed and screamed, and felt thatI would soon go mad. Then in my dream I ran and ran in a fever of utter terror, but I did notknow what I was running from. . . . I left that hideous temple and that hellishvoid, yet I knew I must, barring some miracle, return. . . .

At last my eyes flew open. I was not beneath the tree. I was sprawled on arocky slope, my clothing torn and disordered. My hands were bleeding. I stood up, pain stabbingthrough me. I recognized the spot—the ridge where I had first seen the blasted area! Imust have walked miles—unconscious! The tree was not in sight, and I was glad. . . .Even the knees of my trousers were torn, as if I had crawled part of the way. . . .

I glanced at the sun. Late afternoon! Where had I been? I snatched outmy watch. It had stopped at 10:34. . . .

II.

“So you have the snapshots?” Theunis drawled. I met his gray eyesacross the breakfast table. Three days had slipped by since my return from Hell’s Acres.I had told him about the dream beneath the tree, and he had laughed.

“Yes”, I replied. “They came last night. Haven’t had achance to open them yet. Give ’em a good, careful study—if they aren’t all failures.Perhaps you’ll change your mind.”

Theunis smiled; sipped his coffee. I gave him the unopened envelope and hequickly broke the seal and withdrew the pictures. He glanced at the first one, and the smilefaded from his leonine face. He crushed out his cigarette.

“My God, man! Look at this!”

I seized the glossy rectangle. It was the first picture of the tree, takenat a distance of fifty feet or so. The cause of Theunis’ excitement escaped me. There itwas, standing boldly on the hill, while below it grew the jungle of grass where I had lain.In the distance were my snow-capped mountains!

“There you are”, I cried. “The proof of my story—”

“Look at it!” Theunis snapped. “The shadows—there are three for every rock, bush, and tree!”

He was right. . . . Below the tree, spread in fanlike incongruity,lay three overlapping shadows. Suddenly I realized that the picture held an abnormal and inconsistentelement. The leaves on the thing were too lush for the work of sane nature, while the trunkwas bulged and knotted in the most abhorrent shapes. Theunis dropped the picture on the table.

“There is something wrong,” I muttered. “The tree I saw didn’t look as repulsive as that—”

“Are you sure?” Theunis grated. “The fact is, you may have seen many things not recorded on this film.”

“It shows more than I saw!”

“That’s the point. There is something damnably out of place in thislandscape; something I can’t understand. The tree seems to suggest a thought—beyondmy grasp. . . . It is too misty; too uncertain; too unreal to be natural!”He rapped nervous fingers on the table. He snatched the remaining films and shuffled throughthem, rapidly.

I reached for the snapshot he had dropped, and sensed a touch of bizarre uncertaintyand strangeness as my eyes absorbed its every detail. The flowers and weeds pointed at varyingangles, while some of the grass grew in the most bewildering fashion. The tree seemed too veiledand clouded to be readily distinguished, but I noted the huge limbs and the half-bent flowerstems that were ready to fall over, yet did not fall. And the many, overlapping shadows. . . .They were, altogether, very disquieting shadows—too long or short when compared to thestems they fell below to give one a feeling of comfortable normality. The landscape hadn’tshocked me the day of my visit. . . . There was a dark familiarity and mockingsuggestion in it; something tangible, yet distant as the stars beyond the galaxy.

Theunis came back to earth. “Did you mention three suns in your dreaming orgy?”

I nodded, frankly puzzled. Then it dawned on me. My fingers trembled slightlyas I stared at the picture again. My dream! Of course—

“The others are just like it”, Theunis said. “That same uncertainness;that suggestion. I should be able to catch the mood of the thing; see it in its reallight, but it is too. . . . Perhaps later I shall find out, if I look at it longenough.”

We sat in silence for some time. A thought came to me, suddenly, prompted bya strange, inexplicable longing to visit the tree again. “Let’s make an excursion. I think I can take you there in half a day.”

“You’d better stay away”, replied Theunis, thoughtfully. “Idoubt if you could find the place again if you wanted to.”

“Nonsense”, I replied. “Surely, with these photos to guide us— “

“Did you see any familiar landmarks in them?”

His observation was uncanny. After looking through the remaining snaps carefully, I had to admit that there were none.

Theunis muttered under his breath and drew viciously on his cigarette. “Aperfectly normal—or nearly so—picture of a spot apparently dropped from nowhere. Seeingmountains at this low altitude is preposterous . . . but wait!”

He sprang from the chair as a hunted animal and raced from the room. I couldhear him moving about in our makeshift library, cursing volubly. Before long he reappeared withan old, leather-bound volume. Theunis opened it reverently, and peered over the odd characters.

“What do you call that?” I inquired.

“This is an early English translation of the Chronicle of Nath,written by Rudolf Yergler, a German mystic and alchemist who borrowed some of his lore fromHermes Trismegistus, the ancient Egyptian sorcerer. There is a passage here that might interestyou—might make you understand why this business is even further from the natural than yoususpect. Listen.”

Theunis paused while I stared, bewildered. Finally he spoke. “Now, Single,I suppose you can guess how all this links up. There is no need of going deep into the primallore behind this business, but I may as well tell you that according to the old legends thisis the so-called ‘Year of the Black Goat’—when certain horrors from the fathomlessOutside are supposed to visit the earth and do infinite harm. We don’t know how they’llbe manifest, but there’s reason to think that strange mirages and hallucinations will bemixed up in the matter. I don’t like the thing you’ve run up against—the story or thepictures. It may be pretty bad, and I warn you to look out. But first I must try to do whatold Yergler says—to see if I can glimpse the matter as it is. Fortunately the old Gemhe mentions has been rediscovered—I know where I can get at it. We must use it on the photographsand see what we see.”

“It’s more or less like a lens or prism, though one can’t takephotographs with it. Someone of peculiar sensitiveness might look through and sketch what hesees. There’s a bit of danger, and the looker may have his consciousness shaken a trifle;for the real shape of the shadow isn’t pleasant and doesn’t belong on this earth.But it would be a lot more dangerous not to do anything about it. Meanwhile, if you value yourlife and sanity, keep away from that hill—and from the thing you think is a tree on it.”

I was more bewildered than ever. “How can there be organized beings from the Outside in our midst?” I cried. “How do we know that such thingsexist?”

“You reason in terms of this tiny earth” , Theunis said. “Surelyyou don’t think that the world is a rule for measuring the universe. There are entitieswe never dream of floating under our very noses. Modern science is thrusting back the borderlandof the unknown and proving that the mystics were not so far off the track—”

Suddenly I knew that I did not want to look at the picture again; I wantedto destroy it. I wanted to run from it. Theunis was suggesting something beyond. . . .A trembling, cosmic fear gripped me and drew me away from the hideous picture, for I was afraidI would recognize some object in it. . . .

I glanced at my friend. He was poring over the ancient book, a strange expressionon his face. He sat up straight. “Let’s call the thing off for today. I’m tiredof this endless guessing and wondering. I must get the loan of the gem from the museum whereit is, and do what is to be done.”

“As you say”, I replied. “Will you have to go to Croydon?”

He nodded.

“Then we’ll both go home”, I said decisively.

III.

I need not chronicle the events of the fortnight that followed. With me theyformed a constant and enervating struggle between a mad longing to return to the cryptic treeof dreams and freedom, and a frenzied dread of that selfsame thing and all connected with it.That I did not return is perhaps less a matter of my own will than a matter of pure chance.Meanwhile I knew that Theunis was desperately active in some investigation of the strangestnature—something which included a mysterious motor trip and a return under circ*mstancesof the greatest secrecy. By hints over the telephone I was made to understand that he had somewhereborrowed the obscure and primal object mentioned in the ancient volume as “The Gem,”and that he was busy devising a means of applying it to the photographs I had left with him.He spoke fragmentarily of “refraction”, “polarization”, and “unknown angles of space and time”, and indicated that he was building a kind ofbox or camera obscura for the study of the curious snapshots with the gem’s aid.

It was on the sixteenth day that I received the startling message from thehospital in Croydon. Theunis was there, and wanted to see me at once. He had suffered some oddsort of seizure; being found prone and unconscious by friends who found their way into his houseafter hearing certain cries of mortal agony and fear. Though still weak and helpless, he hadnow regained his senses and seemed frantic to tell me something and have me perform certainimportant duties. This much the hospital informed me over the wire; and within half an hourI was at my friend’s bedside, marveling at the inroads which worry and tension had madeon his features in so brief a time. His first act was to move away the nurses in order to speakin utter confidence.

“Single—I saw it!” His voice was strained and husky. “Youmust destroy them all—those pictures. I sent it back by seeing it, but the pictures hadbetter go. That tree will never be seen on the hill again—at least, I hope not—tillthousands of eons bring back the Year of the Black Goat. You are safe now—mankind is safe.”He paused, breathing heavily, and continued.

“Take the Gem out of the apparatus and put it in the safe—you knowthe combination. It must go back where it came from, for there’s a time when it may beneeded to save the world. They won’t let me leave here yet, but I can rest if I know it’ssafe. Don’t look through the box as it is—it would fix you as it’s fixed me.And burn those damned photographs . . . the one in the box and the others. . . . .”But Theunis was exhausted now, and the nurses advanced and motioned me away as he leaned backand closed his eyes.

In another half-hour I was at his house and looking curiously at the long blackbox on the library table beside the overturned chair. Scattered papers blew about in a breezefrom the open window, and close to the box I recognized with a queer sensation the envelopeof pictures I had taken. It required only a moment for me to examine the box and detach at oneend my earliest picture of the tree, and at the other end a strange bit of amber-colored crystal,cut in devious angles impossible to classify. The touch of the glass fragment seemed curiouslywarm and electric, and I could scarcely bear to put it out of sight in Theunis’ wall safe.The snapshot I handled with a disconcerting mixture of emotions. Even after I had replaced itin the envelope with the rest I had a morbid longing to save it and gloat over it and rush outand up the hill toward its original. Peculiar line-arrangements sprang out of its details toassault and puzzle my memory . . . pictures behind pictures . . . secretslurking in half-familiar shapes. . . . But a saner contrary instinct, operatingat the same time, gave me the vigor and avidity of unplaceable fear as I hastily kindled a firein the grate and watched the problematic envelope burn to ashes. Somehow I felt that the earthhad been purged of a horror on whose brink I had trembled, and which was none the less monstrousbecause I did not know what it was.

Of the source of Theunis’ terrific shock I could form no coherent guess,nor did I dare to think too closely about it. It is notable that I did not at any time havethe least impulse to look through the box before removing the gem and photograph. What was shownin the picture by the antique crystal’s lens or prism-like power was not, I felt curiouslycertain, anything that a normal brain ought to be called upon to face. Whatever it was, I hadmyself been close to it—had been completely under the spell of its allurement—as itbrooded on that remote hill in the form of a tree and an unfamiliar landscape. And I did notwish to know what I had so narrowly escaped.

Would that my ignorance might have remained complete! I could sleep betterat night. As it was, my eye was arrested before I left the room by the pile of scattered papersrustling on the table beside the black box. All but one were blank, but that one bore a crudedrawing in pencil. Suddenly recalling what Theunis had once said about sketching the horrorrevealed by the gem, I strove to turn away; but sheer curiosity defeated my sane design. Lookingagain almost furtively, I observed the nervous haste of the strokes, and the unfinished edgeleft by the sketcher’s terrified seizure. Then, in a burst of perverse boldness, I lookedsquarely at the dark and forbidden design—and fell in a faint.

I shall never describe fully what I saw. After a time I regained my senses,thrust the sheet into the dying fire, and staggered out through the quiet streets to my home.I thanked God that I had not looked through the crystal at the photograph, and prayed ferventlythat I might forget the drawing’s terrible hint of what Theunis had beheld. Since thenI have never been quite the same. Even the fairest scenes have seemed to hold some vague, ambiguoushint of the nameless blasphemies which may underlie them and form their masquerading essence.And yet the sketch was so slight—so little indicative of all that Theunis, to judge fromhis guarded accounts later on, must have discerned!

Only a few basic elements of the landscape were in the thing. For the mostpart a cloudy, exotic-looking vapor dominated the view. Every object that might have been familiarwas seen to be part of something vague and unknown and altogether un-terrestrial—somethinginfinitely vaster than any human eye could grasp, and infinitely alien, monstrous, and hideousas guessed from the fragment within range.

Where I had, in the landscape itself, seen the twisted, half-sentient tree,there was here visible only a gnarled, terrible hand or talon with fingers or feelers shockinglydistended and evidently groping toward something on the ground or in the spectator’s direction.And squarely below the writhing, bloated digits I thought I saw an outline in the grass wherea man had lain. But the sketch was hasty, and I could not be sure.

I.

It is only within the last few years that most people have stopped thinking of the West as a new land. I suppose the idea gained ground becauseour own especial civilisation happens to be new there; but nowadays explorers are digging beneath the surface and bringing up wholechapters of life that rose and fell among these plains and mountains before recorded historybegan. We think nothing of a Pueblo village 2500 years old, and it hardly jolts us when archaeologistsput the sub-pedregal culture of Mexico back to 17,000 or 18,000 B. C. We hear rumours of stillolder things, too—of primitive man contemporaneous with extinct animals and known todayonly through a few fragmentary bones and artifacts—so that the idea of newness is fading outpretty rapidly. Europeans usually catch the sense of immemorial ancientness and deep depositsfrom successive life-streams better than we do. Only a couple of years ago a British authorspoke of Arizona as a “moon-dim region, very lovely in its way, and stark and old—anancient, lonely land”.

Yet I believe I have a deeper sense of the stupefying—almost horrible—ancientnessof the West than any European. It all comes from an incident that happened in 1928; an incidentwhich I’d greatly like to dismiss as three-quarters hallucination, but which has leftsuch a frightfully firm impression on my memory that I can’t put it off very easily. Itwas in Oklahoma, where my work as an American Indian ethnologist constantly takes me and whereI had come upon some devilishly strange and disconcerting matters before. Make no mistake—Oklahomais a lot more than a mere pioneers’ and promoters’ frontier. There are old, oldtribes with old, old memories there; and when the tom-toms beat ceaselessly over brooding plainsin the autumn the spirits of men are brought dangerously close to primal, whispered things.I am white and Eastern enough myself, but anybody is welcome to know that the rites of Yig,Father of Snakes, can get a real shudder out of me any day. I have heard and seen too much tobe “sophisticated” in such matters. And so it is with this incident of 1928. I’dlike to laugh it off—but I can’t.

I had gone into Oklahoma to track down and correlate one of the many ghosttales which were current among the white settlers, but which had strong Indian corroboration,and—I felt sure—an ultimate Indian source. They were very curious, these open-airghost tales; and though they sounded flat and prosaic in the mouths of the white people, theyhad earmarks of linkage with some of the richest and obscurest phases of native mythology. Allof them were woven around the vast, lonely, artificial-looking mounds in the western part ofthe state, and all of them involved apparitions of exceedingly strange aspect and equipment.

The commonest, and among the oldest, became quite famous in 1892, when a governmentmarshal named John Willis went into the mound region after horse-thieves and came out with awild yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses in the air between great armies of invisible spectres—battlesthat involved the rush of hooves and feet, the thud of blows, the clank of metal on metal, themuffled cries of warriors, and the fall of human and equine bodies. These things happened bymoonlight, and frightened his horse as well as himself. The sounds persisted an hour at a time;vivid, but subdued as if brought from a distance by a wind, and unaccompanied by any glimpseof the armies themselves. Later on Willis learned that the seat of the sounds was a notoriouslyhaunted spot, shunned by settlers and Indians alike. Many had seen, or half seen, the warringhorsem*n in the sky, and had furnished dim, ambiguous descriptions. The settlers described theghostly fighters as Indians, though of no familiar tribe, and having the most singular costumesand weapons. They even went so far as to say that they could not be sure the horses were reallyhorses.

The Indians, on the other hand, did not seem to claim the spectres as kinsfolk.They referred to them as “those people”, “the old people”, or “theywho dwell below”, and appeared to hold them in too great a frightened veneration to talkmuch about them. No ethnologist had been able to pin any tale-teller down to a specific descriptionof the beings, and apparently nobody had ever had a very clear look at them. The Indians hadone or two old proverbs about these phenomena, saying that “men very old, make very bigspirit; not so old, not so big; older than all time, then spirit he so big he near flesh; thoseold people and spirits they mix up—get all the same”.

Now all of this, of course, is “old stuff” to an ethnologist—ofa piece with the persistent legends of rich hidden cities and buried races which abound amongthe Pueblo and plains Indians, and which lured Coronado centuries ago on his vain search forthe fabled Quivira. What took me into western Oklahoma was something far more definite and tangible—alocal and distinctive tale which, though really old, was wholly new to the outside world ofresearch, and which involved the first clear descriptions of the ghosts which it treated of.There was an added thrill in the fact that it came from the remote town of Binger, in CaddoCounty, a place I had long known as the scene of a very terrible and partly inexplicable occurrenceconnected with the snake-god myth.

The tale, outwardly, was an extremely naive and simple one, and centred ina huge, lone mound or small hill that rose above the plain about a third of a mile west of thevillage—a mound which some thought a product of Nature, but which others believed to bea burial-place or ceremonial dais constructed by prehistoric tribes. This mound, the villagerssaid, was constantly haunted by two Indian figures which appeared in alternation; an old manwho paced back and forth along the top from dawn till dusk, regardless of the weather and withonly brief intervals of disappearance, and a squaw who took his place at night with a blue-flamedtorch that glimmered quite continuously till morning. When the moon was bright the squaw’speculiar figure could be seen fairly plainly, and over half the villagers agreed that the apparitionwas headless.

Local opinion was divided as to the motives and relative ghostliness of thetwo visions. Some held that the man was not a ghost at all, but a living Indian who had killedand beheaded a squaw for gold and buried her somewhere on the mound. According to these theoristshe was pacing the eminence through sheer remorse, bound by the spirit of his victim which tookvisible shape after dark. But other theorists, more uniform in their spectral beliefs, heldthat both man and woman were ghosts; the man having killed the squaw and himself as well atsome very distant period. These and minor variant versions seemed to have been current eversince the settlement of the Wichita country in 1889, and were, I was told, sustained to an astonishingdegree by still-existing phenomena which anyone might observe for himself. Not many ghost talesoffer such free and open proof, and I was very eager to see what bizarre wonders might be lurkingin this small, obscure village so far from the beaten path of crowds and from the ruthless searchlightof scientific knowledge. So, in the late summer of 1928 I took a train for Binger and broodedon strange mysteries as the cars rattled timidly along their single track through a lonelierand lonelier landscape.

Binger is a modest cluster of frame houses and stores in the midst of a flatwindy region full of clouds of red dust. There are about 500 inhabitants besides the Indianson a neighbouring reservation; the principal occupation seeming to be agriculture. The soilis decently fertile, and the oil boom has not reached this part of the state. My train drewin at twilight, and I felt rather lost and uneasy—cut off from wholesome and every-daythings—as it puffed away to the southward without me. The station platform was filledwith curious loafers, all of whom seemed eager to direct me when I asked for the man to whomI had letters of introduction. I was ushered along a commonplace main street whose rutted surfacewas red with the sandstone soil of the country, and finally delivered at the door of my prospectivehost. Those who had arranged things for me had done well; for Mr. Compton was a man of highintelligence and local responsibility, while his mother—who lived with him and was familiarlyknown as “Grandma Compton” —was one of the first pioneer generation, and a veritablemine of anecdote and folklore.

That evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current among thevillagers, proving that the phenomenon I had come to study was indeed a baffling and importantone. The ghosts, it seems, were accepted almost as a matter of course by everyone in Binger.Two generations had been born and grown up within sight of that queer, lone tumulus and itsrestless figures. The neighbourhood of the mound was naturally feared and shunned, so that thevillage and the farms had not spread toward it in all four decades of settlement; yet venturesomeindividuals had several times visited it. Some had come back to report that they saw no ghostsat all when they neared the dreaded hill; that somehow the lone sentinel had stepped out ofsight before they reached the spot, leaving them free to climb the steep slope and explore theflat summit. There was nothing up there, they said—merely a rough expanse of underbrush.Where the Indian watcher could have vanished to, they had no idea. He must, they reflected,have descended the slope and somehow managed to escape unseen along the plain; although therewas no convenient cover within sight. At any rate, there did not appear to be any opening intothe mound; a conclusion which was reached after considerable exploration of the shrubbery andtall grass on all sides. In a few cases some of the more sensitive searchers declared that theyfelt a sort of invisible restraining presence; but they could describe nothing more definitethan that. It was simply as if the air thickened against them in the direction they wished tomove. It is needless to mention that all these daring surveys were conducted by day. Nothingin the universe could have induced any human being, white or red, to approach that sinisterelevation after dark; and indeed, no Indian would have thought of going near it even in thebrightest sunlight.

But it was not from the tales of these sane, observant seekers that the chiefterror of the ghost-mound sprang; indeed, had their experience been typical, the phenomenonwould have bulked far less prominently in the local legendry. The most evil thing was the factthat many other seekers had come back strangely impaired in mind and body, or had not come backat all. The first of these cases had occurred in 1891, when a young man named Heaton had gonewith a shovel to see what hidden secrets he could unearth. He had heard curious tales from theIndians, and had laughed at the barren report of another youth who had been out to the moundand had found nothing. Heaton had watched the mound with a spy glass from the village whilethe other youth made his trip; and as the explorer neared the spot, he saw the sentinel Indianwalk deliberately down into the tumulus as if a trap-door and staircase existed on the top.The other youth had not noticed how the Indian disappeared, but had merely found him gone uponarriving at the mound.

When Heaton made his own trip he resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery,and watchers from the village saw him hacking diligently at the shrubbery atop the mound. Thenthey saw his figure melt slowly into invisibility; not to reappear for long hours, till afterthe dusk drew on, and the torch of the headless squaw glimmered ghoulishly on the distant elevation.About two hours after nightfall he staggered into the village minus his spade and other belongings,and burst into a shrieking monologue of disconnected ravings. He howled of shocking abyssesand monsters, of terrible carvings and statues, of inhuman captors and grotesque tortures, andof other fantastic abnormalities too complex and chimerical even to remember. “Old! Old!Old!” he would moan over and over again, “great God, they are older than the earth,and came here from somewhere else—they know what you think, and make you know what theythink—they’re half-man, half-ghost—crossed the line—melt and take shape again—gettingmore and more so, yet we’re all descended from them in the beginning—children ofTulu—everything made of gold—monstrous animals, half-human—dead slaves—madness—Iä!Shub-Niggurath!—that white man—oh, my God, what they did to him! . . .”

Heaton was the village idiot for about eight years, after which he died inan epileptic fit. Since his ordeal there had been two more cases of mound-madness, and eightof total disappearance. Immediately after Heaton’s mad return, three desperate and determinedmen had gone out to the lone hill together; heavily armed, and with spades and pickaxes. Watchingvillagers saw the Indian ghost melt away as the explorers drew near, and afterward saw the menclimb the mound and begin scouting around through the underbrush. All at once they faded intonothingness, and were never seen again. One watcher, with an especially powerful telescope,thought he saw other forms dimly materialise beside the hapless men and drag them down intothe mound; but this account remained uncorroborated. It is needless to say that no searching-partywent out after the lost ones, and that for many years the mound was wholly unvisited. Only whenthe incidents of 1891 were largely forgotten did anybody dare to think of further explorations.Then, about 1910, a fellow too young to recall the old horrors made a trip to the shunned spotand found nothing at all.

By 1915 the acute dread and wild legendry of ’91 had largely faded intothe commonplace and unimaginative ghost-tales at present surviving—that is, had so fadedamong the white people. On the nearby reservation were old Indians who thought much and kepttheir own counsel. About this time a second wave of active curiosity and adventuring developed,and several bold searchers made the trip to the mound and returned. Then came a trip of twoEastern visitors with spades and other apparatus—a pair of amateur archaeologists connectedwith a small college, who had been making studies among the Indians. No one watched this tripfrom the village, but they never came back. The searching-party that went out after them—amongwhom was my host Clyde Compton—found nothing whatsoever amiss at the mound.

The next trip was the solitary venture of old Capt. Lawton, a grizzled pioneerwho had helped to open up the region in 1889, but who had never been there since. He had recalledthe mound and its fascination all through the years; and being now in comfortable retirement,resolved to have a try at solving the ancient riddle. Long familiarity with Indian myth hadgiven him ideas rather stranger than those of the simple villagers, and he had made preparationsfor some extensive delving. He ascended the mound on the morning of Thursday, May 11, 1916,watched through spy glasses by more than twenty people in the village and on the adjacent plain.His disappearance was very sudden, and occurred as he was hacking at the shrubbery with a brush-cutter.No one could say more than that he was there one moment and absent the next. For over a weekno tidings of him reached Binger, and then—in the middle of the night—there draggeditself into the village the object about which dispute still rages.

It said it was—or had been—Capt. Lawton, but it was definitely youngerby as much as forty years than the old man who had climbed the mound. Its hair was jet black,and its face—now distorted with nameless fright—free from wrinkles. But it did remindGrandma Compton most uncannily of the captain as he had looked back in ’89. Its feet werecut off neatly at the ankles, and the stumps were smoothly healed to an extent almost incredibleif the being really were the man who had walked upright a week before. It babbled of incomprehensiblethings, and kept repeating the name “George Lawton, George E. Lawton” as if tryingto reassure itself of its own identity. The things it babbled of, Grandma Compton thought, werecuriously like the hallucinations of poor young Heaton in ’91; though there were minordifferences. “The blue light!—the blue light! . . .” muttered theobject, “always down there, before there were any living things—older than the dinosaurs—alwaysthe same, only weaker—never death—brooding and brooding and brooding—thesame people, half-man and half-gas—the dead that walk and work—oh, those beasts,those half-human unicorns—houses and cities of gold—old, old, old, older than time—camedown from the stars—Great Tulu—Azathoth—Nyarlathotep—waiting, waiting. . . .”The object died before dawn.

Of course there was an investigation, and the Indians at the reservation weregrilled unmercifully. But they knew nothing, and had nothing to say. At least, none of themhad anything to say except old Grey Eagle, a Wichita chieftain whose more than a century ofa*ge put him above common fears. He alone deigned to grunt some advice.

“You let um ’lone, white man. No good—those people. All underhere, all under there, them old ones. Yig, big father of snakes, he there. Yig is Yig. Tiráwa,big father of men, he there. Tiráwa is Tiráwa. No die. No get old. Just same likeair. Just live and wait. One time they come out here, live and fight. Build um dirt tepee. Bringup gold—they got plenty. Go off and make new lodges. Me them. You them. Then big waterscome. All change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. You let um ’lone,you have no bad medicine. Red man know, he no get catch. White man meddle, he no come back.Keep ’way little hills. No good. Grey Eagle say this.”

If Joe Norton and Rance Wheelock had taken the old chief’s advice, they wouldprobably be here today; but they didn’t. They were great readers and materialists, andfeared nothing in heaven or earth; and they thought that some Indian fiends had a secret headquartersinside the mound. They had been to the mound before, and now they went again to avenge old Capt.Lawton—boasting that they’d do it if they had to tear the mound down altogether. ClydeCompton watched them with a pair of prism binoculars and saw them round the base of the sinisterhill. Evidently they meant to survey their territory very gradually and minutely. Minutes passed,and they did not reappear. Nor were they ever seen again.

Once more the mound was a thing of panic fright, and only the excitement ofthe Great War served to restore it to the farther background of Binger folklore. It was unvisitedfrom 1916 to 1919, and would have remained so but for the daredeviltry of some of the youthsback from service in France. From 1919 to 1920, however, there was a veritable epidemic of mound-visitingamong the prematurely hardened young veterans—an epidemic that waxed as one youth afteranother returned unhurt and contemptuous. By 1920—so short is human memory—the moundwas almost a joke; and the tame story of the murdered squaw began to displace darker whisperson everybody’s tongues. Then two reckless young brothers—the especially unimaginativeand hard-boiled Clay boys—decided to go and dig up the buried squaw and the gold for whichthe old Indian had murdered her.

They went out on a September afternoon—about the time the Indian tom-tomsbegin their incessant annual beating over the flat, red-dusty plains. Nobody watched them, andtheir parents did not become worried at their non-return for several hours. Then came an alarmand a searching-party, and another resignation to the mystery of silence and doubt.

But one of them came back after all. It was Ed, the elder, and his straw-colouredhair and beard had turned an albino white for two inches from the roots. On his forehead wasa queer scar like a branded hieroglyph. Three months after he and his brother Walker had vanishedhe skulked into his house at night, wearing nothing but a queerly patterned blanket which hethrust into the fire as soon as he had got into a suit of his own clothes. He told his parentsthat he and Walker had been captured by some strange Indians—not Wichitas or Caddos—andheld prisoners somewhere toward the west. Walker had died under torture, but he himself hadmanaged to escape at a high cost. The experience had been particularly terrible, and he couldnot talk about it just then. He must rest—and anyway, it would do no good to give an alarmand try to find and punish the Indians. They were not of a sort that could be caught or punished,and it was especially important for the good of Binger—for the good of the world—thatthey be not pursued into their secret lair. As a matter of fact, they were not altogether whatone could call real Indians—he would explain about that later. Meanwhile he must rest.Better not to rouse the village with the news of his return—he would go upstairs and sleep.Before he climbed the rickety flight to his room he took a pad and pencil from the living-roomtable, and an automatic pistol from his father’s desk drawer.

Three hours later the shot rang out. Ed Clay had put a bullet neatly throughhis temples with a pistol clutched in his left hand, leaving a sparsely written sheet of paperon the rickety table near his bed. He had, it later appeared from the whittled pencil-stub andstove full of charred paper, originally written much more; but had finally decided not to tellwhat he knew beyond vague hints. The surviving fragment was only a mad warning scrawled in acuriously backhanded script—the ravings of a mind obviously deranged by hardships—andit read thus; rather surprisingly for the utterance of one who had always been stolid and matter-of-fact:

For gods sake never go nere that mound it is part of some kind of a world sodevilish and old it cannot be spoke about me and Walker went and was took into the thing justmelted at times and made up agen and the whole world outside is helpless alongside of what theycan do—they what live forever young as they like and you cant tell if they are reallymen or just gostes—and what they do cant be spoke about and this is only 1 entrance—youcant tell how big the whole thing is—after what we seen I dont want to live aney moreFrance was nothing besides this—and see that people always keep away o god they wood ifthey see poor walker like he was in the end.Yrs truelyEd Clay

At the autopsy it was found that all of young Clay’s organs were transposedfrom right to left within his body, as if he had been turned inside out. Whether they had alwaysbeen so, no one could say at the time, but it was later learned from army records that Ed hadbeen perfectly normal when mustered out of the service in May, 1919. Whether there was a mistakesomewhere, or whether some unprecedented metamorphosis had indeed occurred, is still an unsettledquestion, as is also the origin of the hieroglyph-like scar on the forehead.

That was the end of the explorations of the mound. In the eight interveningyears no one had been near the place, and few indeed had even cared to level a spy glass atit. From time to time people continued to glance nervously at the lone hill as it rose starklyfrom the plain against the western sky, and to shudder at the small dark speck that paradedby day and the glimmering will-o’-the-wisp that danced by night. The thing was acceptedat face value as a mystery not to be probed, and by common consent the village shunned the subject.It was, after all, quite easy to avoid the hill; for space was unlimited in every direction,and community life always follows beaten trails. The mound side of the village was simply kepttrailless, as if it had been water or swampland or desert. And it is a curious commentary onthe stolidity and imaginative sterility of the human animal that the whispers with which childrenand strangers were warned away from the mound quickly sank once more into the flat tale of amurderous Indian ghost and his squaw victim. Only the tribesmen on the reservation, and thoughtfulold-timers like Grandma Compton, remembered the overtones of unholy vistas and deep cosmic menacewhich clustered around the ravings of those who had come back changed and shattered.

It was very late, and Grandma Compton had long since gone upstairs to bed,when Clyde finished telling me this. I hardly knew what to think of the frightful puzzle, yetrebelled at any notion to conflict with sane materialism. What influence had brought madness,or the impulse of flight and wandering, to so many who had visited the mound? Though vastlyimpressed, I was spurred on rather than deterred. Surely I must get to the bottom of this matter,as well I might if I kept a cool head and an unbroken determination. Compton saw my mood andshook his head worriedly. Then he motioned me to follow him outdoors.

We stepped from the frame house to the quiet side street or lane, and walkeda few paces in the light of a waning August moon to where the houses were thinner. The half-moonwas still low, and had not blotted many stars from the sky; so that I could see not only thewestering gleams of Altair and Vega, but the mystic shimmering of the Milky Way, as I lookedout over the vast expanse of earth and sky in the direction that Compton pointed. Then all atonce I saw a spark that was not a star—a bluish spark that moved and glimmered againstthe Milky Way near the horizon, and that seemed in a vague way more evil and malevolent thananything in the vault above. In another moment it was clear that this spark came from the topof a long distant rise in the outspread and faintly litten plain; and I turned to Compton witha question.

“Yes”, he answered, “it’s the blue ghost-light—andthat is the mound. There’s not a night in history that we haven’t seen it—andnot a living soul in Binger that would walk out over that plain toward it. It’s a badbusiness, young man, and if you’re wise you’ll let it rest where it is. Better callyour search off, son, and tackle some of the other Injun legends around here. We’ve plentyto keep you busy, heaven knows!”

II.

But I was in no mood for advice; and though Compton gave me a pleasant room,I could not sleep a wink through eagerness for the next morning with its chances to see thedaytime ghost and to question the Indians at the reservation. I meant to go about the wholething slowly and thoroughly, equipping myself with all available data both white and red beforeI commenced any actual archaeological investigations. I rose and dressed at dawn, and when Iheard others stirring I went downstairs. Compton was building the kitchen fire while his motherwas busy in the pantry. When he saw me he nodded, and after a moment invited me out into theglamorous young sunlight. I knew where we were going, and as we walked along the lane I strainedmy eyes westward over the plains.

There was the mound—far away and very curious in its aspect of artificialregularity. It must have been from thirty to forty feet high, and all of a hundred yards fromnorth to south as I looked at it. It was not as wide as that from east to west, Compton said,but had the contour of a rather thinnish ellipse. He, I knew, had been safely out to it andback several times. As I looked at the rim silhouetted against the deep blue of the west I triedto follow its minor irregularities, and became impressed with a sense of something moving uponit. My pulse mounted a bit feverishly, and I seized quickly on the high-powered binoculars whichCompton had quietly offered me. Focussing them hastily, I saw at first only a tangle of underbrushon the distant mound’s rim—and then something stalked into the field.

It was unmistakably a human shape, and I knew at once that I was seeing thedaytime “Indian ghost” I did not wonder at the description, for surely the tall,lean, darkly robed being with the filleted black hair and seamed, coppery, expressionless, aquilineface looked more like an Indian than anything else in my previous experience. And yet my trainedethnologist’s eye told me at once that this was no redskin of any sort hitherto knownto history, but a creature of vast racial variation and of a wholly different culture-stream.Modern Indians are brachycephalic—round-headed—and you can’t find any dolichocephalicor long-headed skulls except in ancient Pueblo deposits dating back 2500 years or more; yetthis man’s long-headedness was so pronounced that I recognised it at once, even at his vast distanceand in the uncertain field of the binoculars. I saw, too, that the pattern of his robe representeda decorative tradition utterly remote from anything we recognise in southwestern native art.There were shining metal trappings, likewise, and a short sword or kindred weapon at his side,all wrought in a fashion wholly alien to anything I had ever heard of.

As he paced back and forth along the top of the mound I followed him for severalminutes with the glass, noting the kinaesthetic quality of his stride and the poised way hecarried his head; and there was borne in upon me the strong, persistent conviction that thisman, whoever or whatever he might be, was certainly not a savage. He was the productof a civilisation, I felt instinctively, though of what civilisation I could not guess.At length he disappeared beyond the farther edge of the mound, as if descending the oppositeand unseen slope; and I lowered the glass with a curious mixture of puzzled feelings. Comptonwas looking quizzically at me, and I nodded non-committally, “What do you make of that?”he ventured. “This is what we’ve seen here in Binger every day of our lives.”

That noon found me at the Indian reservation talking with old Grey Eagle—who,through some miracle, was still alive; though he must have been close to a hundred and fiftyyears old. He was a strange, impressive figure—this stern, fearless leader of his kindwho had talked with outlaws and traders in fringed buckskin and French officials in knee-breechesand three-cornered hats—and I was glad to see that, because of my air of deference towardhim, he appeared to like me. His liking, however, took an unfortunately obstructive form assoon as he learned what I wanted; for all he would do was to warn me against the search I wasabout to make.

“You good boy—you no bother that hill. Bad medicine. Plenty devilunder there—catchum when you dig. No dig, no hurt. Go and dig, no come back. Just samewhen me boy, just same when my father and he father boy. All time buck he walk in day, squawwith no head she walk in night. All time since white man with tin coats they come from sunsetand below big river—long way back—three, four times more back than Grey Eagle—twotimes more back than Frenchmen—all same after then. More back than that, nobody go nearlittle hills nor deep valleys with stone caves. Still more back, those old ones no hide, comeout and make villages. Bring plenty gold. Me them. You them. Then big waters come. All change.Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. They no die—no get old like Grey Eaglewith valleys in face and snow on head. Just same like air—some man, some spirit. Bad medicine.Sometimes at night spirit come out on half-man-half-horse-with-horn and fight where men oncefight. Keep ’way them place. No good. You good boy—go ’way and let them oldones ’lone.”

That was all I could get out of the ancient chief, and the rest of the Indianswould say nothing at all. But if I was troubled, Grey Eagle was clearly more so; for he obviouslyfelt a real regret at the thought of my invading the region he feared so abjectly. As I turnedto leave the reservation he stopped me for a final ceremonial farewell, and once more triedto get my promise to abandon my search. When he saw that he could not, he produced somethinghalf-timidly from a buckskin pouch he wore, and extended it toward me very solemnly. It wasa worn but finely minted metal disc about two inches in diameter, oddly figured and perforated,and suspended from a leathern cord.

“You no promise, then Grey Eagle no can tell what get you. But if anythinghelp um, this good medicine. Come from my father—he get from he father—he get fromhe father—all way back, close to Tiráwa, all men’s father. My father say,’You keep ’way from those old ones, keep ’way from little hills and valleyswith stone caves. But if old ones they come out to get you, then you shew um this medicine.They know. They make him long way back. They look, then they no do such bad medicine maybe.But no can tell. You keep ‘way, just same. Them no good. No tell what they do.’”

As he spoke, Grey Eagle was hanging the thing around my neck, and I saw itwas a very curious object indeed. The more I looked at it, the more I marvelled; for not onlywas its heavy, darkish, lustrous, and richly mottled substance an absolutely strange metal tome, but what was left of its design seemed to be of a marvellously artistic and utterly unknownworkmanship. One side, so far as I could see, had borne an exquisitely modelled serpent design;whilst the other side had depicted a kind of octopus or other tentacled monster. There weresome half-effaced hieroglyphs, too, of a kind which no archaeologist could identify or evenplace conjecturally. With Grey Eagle’s permission I later had expert historians, anthropologists,geologists, and chemists pass carefully upon the disc, but from them I obtained only a chorusof bafflement. It defied either classification or analysis. The chemists called it an amalgamof unknown metallic elements of heavy atomic weight, and one geologist suggested that the substancemust be of meteoric origin, shot from unknown gulfs of interstellar space. Whether it reallysaved my life or sanity or existence as a human being I cannot attempt to say, but Grey Eagleis sure of it. He has it again, now, and I wonder if it has any connexion with his inordinateage. All his fathers who had it lived far beyond the century mark, perishing only in battle.Is it possible that Grey Eagle, if kept from accidents, will never die? But I am ahead of mystory.

When I returned to the village I tried to secure more mound-lore, but foundonly excited gossip and opposition. It was really flattering to see how solicitous the peoplewere about my safety, but I had to set their almost frantic remonstrances aside. I shewed themGrey Eagle’s charm, but none of them had ever heard of it before, or seen anything evenremotely like it. They agreed that it could not be an Indian relic, and imagined that the oldchief’s ancestors must have obtained it from some trader.

When they saw they could not deter me from my trip, the Binger citizens sadlydid what they could to aid my outfitting. Having known before my arrival the sort of work tobe done, I had most of my supplies already with me—machete and trench-knife for shrub-clearingand excavating, electric torches for any underground phase which might develop, rope, field-glasses,tape-measure, microscope, and incidentals for emergencies—as much, in fact, as might becomfortably stowed in a convenient handbag. To this equipment I added only the heavy revolverwhich the sheriff forced upon me, and the pick and shovel which I thought might expedite mywork.

I decided to carry these latter things slung over my shoulder with a stoutcord—for I soon saw that I could not hope for any helpers or fellow-explorers. The villagewould watch me, no doubt, with all its available telescopes and field-glasses; but it wouldnot send any citizen so much as a yard over the flat plain toward the lone hillock. My startwas timed for early the next morning, and all the rest of that day I was treated with the awedand uneasy respect which people give to a man about to set out for certain doom.

When morning came—a cloudy though not a threatening morning—thewhole village turned out to see me start across the dustblown plain. Binoculars shewed the loneman at his usual pacing on the mound, and I resolved to keep him in sight as steadily as possibleduring my approach. At the last moment a vague sense of dread oppressed me, and I was just weakand whimsical enough to let Grey Eagle’s talisman swing on my chest in full view of anybeings or ghosts who might be inclined to heed it. Bidding au revoir to Compton and his mother,I started off at a brisk stride despite the bag in my left hand and the clanking pick and shovelstrapped to my back; holding my field-glass in my right hand and taking a glance at the silentpacer from time to time. As I neared the mound I saw the man very clearly, and fancied I couldtrace an expression of infinite evil and decadence on his seamed, hairless features. I was startled,too, to see that his goldenly gleaming weapon-case bore hieroglyphs very similar to those onthe unknown talisman I wore. All the creature’s costume and trappings bespoke exquisiteworkmanship and cultivation. Then, all too abruptly, I saw him start down the farther side ofthe mound and out of sight. When I reached the place, about ten minutes after I set out, therewas no one there.

There is no need of relating how I spent the early part of my search in surveyingand circumnavigating the mound, taking measurements, and stepping back to view the thing fromdifferent angles. It had impressed me tremendously as I approached it, and there seemed to bea kind of latent menace in its too regular outlines. It was the only elevation of any sort onthe wide, level plain; and I could not doubt for a moment that it was an artificial tumulus.The steep sides seemed wholly unbroken, and without marks of human tenancy or passage. Therewere no signs of a path toward the top; and, burdened as I was, I managed to scramble up onlywith considerable difficulty. When I reached the summit I found a roughly level elliptical plateauabout 300 by 50 feet in dimensions; uniformly covered with rank grass and dense underbrush,and utterly incompatible with the constant presence of a pacing sentinel. This condition gaveme a real shock, for it shewed beyond question that the “Old Indian”, vivid thoughhe seemed, could not be other than a collective hallucination.

I looked about with considerable perplexity and alarm, glancing wistfully backat the village and the mass of black dots which I knew was the watching crowd. Training my glassupon them, I saw that they were studying me avidly with their glasses; so to reassure them Iwaved my cap in the air with a show of jauntiness which I was far from feeling. Then, settlingto my work I flung down pick, shovel, and bag; taking my machete from the latter and commencingto clear away underbrush. It was a weary task, and now and then I felt a curious shiver as someperverse gust of wind arose to hamper my motion with a skill approaching deliberateness. Attimes it seemed as if a half-tangible force were pushing me back as I worked—almost asif the air thickened in front of me, or as if formless hands tugged at my wrists. My energyseemed used up without producing adequate results, yet for all that I made some progress.

By afternoon I had clearly perceived that, toward the northern end of the mound,there was a slight bowl-like depression in the root-tangled earth. While this might mean nothing,it would be a good place to begin when I reached the digging stage, and I made a mental noteof it. At the same time I noticed another and very peculiar thing—namely, that the Indiantalisman swinging from my neck seemed to behave oddly at a point about seventeen feet southeastof the suggested bowl. Its gyrations were altered whenever I happened to stoop around that point,and it tugged downward as if attracted by some magnetism in the soil. The more I noticed this,the more it struck me, till at length I decided to do a little preliminary digging there withoutfurther delay.

As I turned up the soil with my trench-knife I could not help wondering atthe relative thinness of the reddish regional layer. The country as a whole was all red sandstoneearth, but here I found a strange black loam less than a foot down. It was such soil as onefinds in the strange, deep valleys farther west and south, and must surely have been broughtfrom a considerable distance in the prehistoric age when the mound was reared. Kneeling anddigging, I felt the leathern cord around my neck tugged harder and harder, as something in thesoil seemed to draw the heavy metal talisman more and more. Then I felt my implements strikea hard surface, and wondered if a rock layer rested beneath. Prying about with the trench-knife,I found that such was not the case. Instead, to my intense surprise and feverish interest, Ibrought up a mould-clogged, heavy object of cylindrical shape—about a foot long and fourinches in diameter—to which my hanging talisman clove with glue-like tenacity. As I clearedoff the black loam my wonder and tension increased at the bas-reliefs revealed by that process.The whole cylinder, ends and all, was covered with figures and hieroglyphs; and I saw with growingexcitement that these things were in the same unknown tradition as those on Grey Eagle’scharm and on the yellow metal trappings of the ghost I had seen through my binoculars.

Sitting down, I further cleaned the magnetic cylinder against the rough corduroyof my knickerbockers, and observed that it was made of the same heavy, lustrous unknown metalas the charm—hence, no doubt, the singular attraction. The carvings and chasings were very strangeand very horrible—nameless monsters and designs fraught with insidious evil—andall were of the highest finish and craftsmanship. I could not at first make head or tail ofthe thing, and handled it aimlessly until I spied a cleavage near one end. Then I sought eagerlyfor some mode of opening, discovering at last that the end simply unscrewed.

The cap yielded with difficulty, but at last it came off, liberating a curiousaromatic odour. The sole contents was a bulky roll of a yellowish, paper-like substance inscribedin greenish characters, and for a second I had the supreme thrill of fancying that I held awritten key to unknown elder worlds and abysses beyond time. Almost immediately, however, theunrolling of one end shewed that the manuscript was in Spanish—albeit the formal, pompousSpanish of a long-departed day. In the golden sunset light I looked at the heading and the openingparagraph, trying to decipher the wretched and ill-punctuated script of the vanished writer.What manner of relic was this? Upon what sort of a discovery had I stumbled? The first wordsset me in a new fury of excitement and curiosity, for instead of diverting me from my originalquest they startlingly confirmed me in that very effort.

The yellow scroll with the green script began with a bold, identifying captionand a ceremoniously desperate appeal for belief in incredible revelations to follow:

I paused to reflect on the portentous significance of what I was reading. “TheNarrative of Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez, gentleman, of Luarca in Asturias,Concerning the Subterranean World of Xinaián, A. D. 1545” . . . Here,surely, was too much for any mind to absorb all at once. A subterranean world—again thatpersistent idea which filtered through all the Indian tales and through all the utterances ofthose who had come back from the mound. And the date—1545—what could this mean?In 1540 Coronado and his men had gone north from Mexico into the wilderness, but had they notturned back in 1542! My eye ran questingly down the opened part of the scroll, and almost atonce seized on the name Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. The writer of this thing,clearly, was one of Coronado’s men—but what had he been doing in this remote realmthree years after his party had gone back? I must read further, for another glance told me thatwhat was now unrolled was merely a summary of Coronado’s northward march, differing inno essential way from the account known to history.

It was only the waning light which checked me before I could unroll and readmore, and in my impatient bafflement I almost forgot to be frightened at the onrush of nightin this sinister place. Others, however, had not forgotten the lurking terror, for I heard aloud distant hallooing from a knot of men who had gathered at the edge of the town. Answeringthe anxious hail, I restored the manuscript to its strange cylinder—to which the discaround my neck still clung until I pried it off and packed it and my smaller implements fordeparture. Leaving the pick and shovel for the next day’s work, I took up my handbag,scrambled down the steep side of the mound, and in another quarter-hour was back in the villageexplaining and exhibiting my curious find. As darkness drew on, I glanced back at the moundI had so lately left, and saw with a shudder that the faint bluish torch of the nocturnal squaw-ghosthad begun to glimmer.

It was hard work waiting to get at the bygone Spaniard’s narrative; butI knew I must have quiet and leisure for a good translation, so reluctantly saved the task forthe later hours of night. Promising the townsfolk a clear account of my findings in the morning,and giving them an ample opportunity to examine the bizarre and provocative cylinder, I accompaniedClyde Compton home and ascended to my room for the translating process as soon as I possiblycould. My host and his mother were intensely eager to hear the tale, but I thought they hadbetter wait till I could thoroughly absorb the text myself and give them the gist conciselyand unerringly.

Opening my handbag in the light of a single electric bulb, I again took outthe cylinder and noted the instant magnetism which pulled the Indian talisman to its carvensurface. The designs glimmered evilly on the richly lustrous and unknown metal, and I couldnot help shivering as I studied the abnormal and blasphemous forms that leered at me with suchexquisite workmanship. I wish now that I had carefully photographed all these designs—thoughperhaps it is just as well that I did not. Of one thing I am really glad, and that is that Icould not then identify the squatting octopus-headed thing which dominated most of the ornatecartouches, and which the manuscript called “Tulu”. Recently I have associated it,and the legends in the manuscript connected with it, with some new-found folklore of monstrousand unmentioned Cthulhu, a horror which seeped down from the stars while the young earth wasstill half-formed; and had I known of the connexion then, I could not have stayed in the sameroom with the thing. The secondary motif, a semi-anthropomorphic serpent, I did quite readilyplace as a prototype of the Yig, Quetzalcoatl, and Kukulcan conceptions. Before opening thecylinder I tested its magnetic powers on metals other than that of Grey Eagle’s disc,but found that no attraction existed. It was no common magnetism which pervaded this morbidfragment of unknown worlds and linked it to its kind.

At last I took out the manuscript and began translating—jotting down a synopticoutline in English as I went, and now and then regretting the absence of a Spanish dictionarywhen I came upon some especially obscure or archaic word or construction. There was a senseof ineffable strangeness in thus being thrown back nearly four centuries in the midst of mycontinuous quest—thrown back to a year when my own forbears were settled, homekeepinggentlemen of Somerset and Devon under Henry the Eighth, with never a thought of the adventurethat was to take their blood to Virginia and the New World; yet when that new world possessed,even as now, the same brooding mystery of the mound which formed my present sphere and horizon.The sense of a throwback was all the stronger because I felt instinctively that the common problemof the Spaniard and myself was one of such abysmal timelessness—of such unholy and unearthlyeternity—that the scant four hundred years between us bulked as nothing in comparison.It took no more than a single look at that monstrous and insidious cylinder to make me realisethe dizzying gulfs that yawned between all men of the known earth and the primal mysteries itrepresented. Before that gulf Pánfilo de Zamacona and I stood side by side; just as Aristotleand I, or Cheops and I, might have stood.

III.

Of his youth in Luarca, a small, placid port on the Bay of Biscay, Zamaconatold little. He had been wild, and a younger son, and had come to New Spain in 1532, when onlytwenty years old. Sensitively imaginative, he had listened spellbound to the floating rumoursof rich cities and unknown worlds to the north—and especially to the tale of the Franciscanfriar Marcos de Niza, who came back from a trip in 1539 with glowing accounts of fabulous Cíbolaand its great walled towns with terraced stone houses. Hearing of Coronado’s contemplatedexpedition in search of these wonders—and of the greater wonders whispered to lie beyondthem in the land of buffaloes—young Zamacona managed to join the picked party of 300,and started north with the rest in 1540.

History knows the story of that expedition—how Cíbola was foundto be merely the squalid Pueblo village of Zuñi, and how de Niza was sent back to Mexicoin disgrace for his florid exaggerations; how Coronado first saw the Grand Canyon, and how atCicuyé, on the Pecos, he heard from the Indian called El Turco of the rich and mysteriousland of Quivira, far to the northeast, where gold, silver, and buffaloes abounded, and wherethere flowed a river two leagues wide. Zamacona told briefly of the winter camp at Tiguex onthe Pecos, and of the northward start in April, when the native guide proved false and led theparty astray amidst a land of prairie-dogs, salt pools, and roving, bison-hunting tribes.

When Coronado dismissed his larger force and made his final forty-two-day marchwith a very small and select detachment, Zamacona managed to be included in the advancing party.He spoke of the fertile country and of the great ravines with trees visible only from the edgeof their steep banks; and of how all the men lived solely on buffalo-meat. And then came mentionof the expedition’s farthest limit—of the presumable but disappointing land of Quivirawith its villages of grass houses, its brooks and rivers, its good black soil, its plums, nuts,grapes, and mulberries, and its maize-growing and copper-using Indians. The execution of ElTurco, the false native guide, was casually touched upon, and there was a mention of the crosswhich Coronado raised on the bank of a great river in the autumn of 1541—a cross bearingthe inscription, “Thus far came the great general, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado”.

This supposed Quivira lay at about the fortieth parallel of north latitude,and I see that quite lately the New York archaeologist Dr. Hodge has identified it with thecourse of the Arkansas River through Barton and Rice Counties, Kansas. It is the old home ofthe Wichitas, before the Sioux drove them south into what is now Oklahoma, and some of the grass-housevillage sites have been found and excavated for artifacts. Coronado did considerable exploringhereabouts, led hither and thither by the persistent rumours of rich cities and hidden worldswhich floated fearfully around on the Indians’ tongues. These northerly natives seemedmore afraid and reluctant to talk about the rumoured cities and worlds than the Mexican Indianshad been; yet at the same time seemed as if they could reveal a good deal more than the Mexicanshad they been willing or dared to do so. Their vagueness exasperated the Spanish leader, andafter many disappointing searches he began to be very severe toward those who brought him stories.Zamacona, more patient than Coronado, found the tales especially interesting; and learned enoughof the local speech to hold long conversations with a young buck named Charging Buffalo, whosecuriosity had led him into much stranger places than any of his fellow-tribesmen had dared topenetrate.

It was Charging Buffalo who told Zamacona of the queer stone doorways, gates,or cave-mouths at the bottom of some of those deep, steep, wooded ravines which the party hadnoticed on the northward march. These openings, he said, were mostly concealed by shrubbery;and few had entered them for untold aeons. Those who went to where they led, never returned—orin a few cases returned mad or curiously maimed. But all this was legend, for nobody was knownto have gone more than a limited distance inside any of them within the memory of the grandfathersof the oldest living men. Charging Buffalo himself had probably been farther than anyone else,and he had seen enough to curb both his curiosity and his greed for the rumoured gold below.

Beyond the aperture he had entered there was a long passage running crazilyup and down and round about, and covered with frightful carvings of monsters and horrors thatno man had ever seen. At last, after untold miles of windings and descents, there was a glowof terrible blue light; and the passage opened upon a shocking nether world. About this theIndian would say no more, for he had seen something that had sent him back in haste. But thegolden cities must be somewhere down there, he added, and perhaps a white man with the magicof the thunder-stick might succeed in getting to them. He would not tell the big chief Coronadowhat he knew, for Coronado would not listen to Indian talk any more. Yes—he could shewZamacona the way if the white man would leave the party and accept his guidance. But he wouldnot go inside the opening with the white man. It was bad in there.

The place was about a five days’ march to the south, near the regionof great mounds. These mounds had something to do with the evil world down there—theywere probably ancient closed-up passages to it, for once the Old Ones below had had colonieson the surface and had traded with men everywhere, even in the lands that had sunk under thebig waters. It was when those lands had sunk that the Old Ones closed themselves up below andrefused to deal with surface people. The refugees from the sinking places had told them thatthe gods of outer earth were against men, and that no men could survive on the outer earth unlessthey were daemons in league with the evil gods. That is why they shut out all surface folk,and did fearful things to any who ventured down where they dwelt. There had been sentries onceat the various openings, but after ages they were no longer needed. Not many people cared totalk about the hidden Old Ones, and the legends about them would probably have died out butfor certain ghostly reminders of their presence now and then. It seemed that the infinite ancientnessof these creatures had brought them strangely near to the borderline of spirit, so that theirghostly emanations were more commonly frequent and vivid. Accordingly the region of the greatmounds was often convulsed with spectral nocturnal battles reflecting those which had been foughtin the days before the openings were closed.

The Old Ones themselves were half-ghost—indeed, it was said that theyno longer grew old or reproduced their kind, but flickered eternally in a state between fleshand spirit. The change was not complete, though, for they had to breathe. It was because theunderground world needed air that the openings in the deep valleys were not blocked up as themound-openings on the plains had been. These openings, Charging Buffalo added, were probablybased on natural fissures in the earth. It was whispered that the Old Ones had come down fromthe stars to the world when it was very young, and had gone inside to build their cities ofsolid gold because the surface was not then fit to live on. They were the ancestors of all men,yet none could guess from what star—or what place beyond the stars—they came. Theirhidden cities were still full of gold and silver, but men had better let them alone unless protectedby very strong magic.

They had frightful beasts with a faint strain of human blood, on which theyrode, and which they employed for other purposes. The things, so people hinted, were carnivorous,and like their masters, preferred human flesh; so that although the Old Ones themselves didnot breed, they had a sort of half-human slave-class which also served to nourish the humanand animal population. This had been very oddly recruited, and was supplemented by a secondslave-class of reanimated corpses. The Old Ones knew how to make a corpse into an automatonwhich would last almost indefinitely and perform any sort of work when directed by streams ofthought. Charging Buffalo said that the people had all come to talk by means of thought only;speech having been found crude and needless, except for religious devotions and emotional expression,as aeons of discovery and study rolled by. They worshipped Yig, the great father of serpents,and Tulu, the octopus-headed entity that had brought them down from the stars; appeasing bothof these hideous monstrosities by means of human sacrifices offered up in a very curious mannerwhich Charging Buffalo did not care to describe.

Zamacona was held spellbound by the Indian’s tale, and at once resolvedto accept his guidance to the cryptic doorway in the ravine. He did not believe the accountsof strange ways attributed by legend to the hidden people, for the experiences of the partyhad been such as to disillusion one regarding native myths of unknown lands; but he did feelthat some sufficiently marvellous field of riches and adventure must indeed lie beyond the weirdlycarved passages in the earth. At first he thought of persuading Charging Buffalo to tell hisstory to Coronado—offering to shield him against any effects of the leader’s testyscepticism—but later he decided that a lone adventure would be better. If he had no aid,he would not have to share anything he found; but might perhaps become a great discoverer andowner of fabulous riches. Success would make him a greater figure than Coronado himself—perhapsa greater figure than anyone else in New Spain, including even the mighty viceroy Don Antoniode Mendoza.

On October 7, 1541, at an hour close to midnight, Zamacona stole out of theSpanish camp near the grass-house village and met Charging Buffalo for the long southward journey.He travelled as lightly as possible, and did not wear his heavy helmet and breastplate. Of thedetails of the trip the manuscript told very little, but Zamacona records his arrival at thegreat ravine on October 13th. The descent of the thickly wooded slope took no great time; andthough the Indian had trouble in locating the shrubbery-hidden stone door again amidst the twilightof that deep gorge, the place was finally found. It was a very small aperture as doorways go,formed of monolithic sandstone jambs and lintel, and bearing signs of nearly effaced and nowundecipherable carvings. Its height was perhaps seven feet, and its width not more than four.There were drilled places in the jambs which argued the bygone presence of a hinged door orgate, but all other traces of such a thing had long since vanished.

At sight of this black gulf Charging Buffalo displayed considerable fear, andthrew down his pack of supplies with signs of haste. He had provided Zamacona with a good stockof resinous torches and provisions, and had guided him honestly and well; but refused to sharein the venture that lay ahead. Zamacona gave him the trinkets he had kept for such an occasion,and obtained his promise to return to the region in a month; afterward shewing the way southwardto the Pecos Pueblo villages. A prominent rock on the plain above them was chosen as a meeting-place;the one arriving first to pitch camp until the other should arrive.

In the manuscript Zamacona expressed a wistful wonder as to the Indian’slength of waiting at the rendezvous—for he himself could never keep that tryst. At thelast moment Charging Buffalo tried to dissuade him from his plunge into the darkness, but soonsaw it was futile, and gestured a stoical farewell. Before lighting his first torch and enteringthe opening with his ponderous pack, the Spaniard watched the lean form of the Indian scramblinghastily and rather relievedly upward among the trees. It was the cutting of his last link withthe world; though he did not know that he was never to see a human being—in the acceptedsense of that term—again.

Zamacona felt no immediate premonition of evil upon entering that ominous doorway,though from the first he was surrounded by a bizarre and unwholesome atmosphere. The passage,slightly taller and wider than the aperture, was for many yards a level tunnel of Cyclopeanmasonry, with heavily worn flagstones under foot, and grotesquely carved granite and sandstoneblocks in sides and ceiling. The carvings must have been loathsome and terrible indeed, to judgefrom Zamacona’s description; according to which most of them revolved around the monstrousbeings Yig and Tulu. They were unlike anything the adventurer had ever seen before, though headded that the native architecture of Mexico came closest to them of all things in the outerworld. After some distance the tunnel began to dip abruptly, and irregular natural rock appearedon all sides. The passage seemed only partly artificial, and decorations were limited to occasionalcartouches with shocking bas-reliefs.

Following an enormous descent, whose steepness at times produced an acute dangerof slipping and tobogganing, the passage became exceedingly uncertain in its direction and variablein its contour. At times it narrowed almost to a slit or grew so low that stooping and evencrawling were necessary, while at other times it broadened out into sizeable caves or chainsof caves. Very little human construction, it was plain, had gone into this part of the tunnel;though occasionally a sinister cartouche or hieroglyphic on the wall, or a blocked-up lateralpassageway, would remind Zamacona that this was in truth the aeon-forgotten high-road to a primaland unbelievable world of living things.

For three days, as best he could reckon, Pánfilo de Zamacona scrambleddown, up, along, and around, but always predominately downward, through this dark region ofpalaeogean night. Once in a while he heard some secret being of darkness patter or flap outof his way, and on just one occasion he half glimpsed a great, bleached thing that set him trembling.The quality of the air was mostly very tolerable; though foetid zones were now and then metwith, while one great cavern of stalactites and stalagmites afforded a depressing dampness.This latter, when Charging Buffalo had come upon it, had quite seriously barred the way; sincethe limestone deposits of ages had built fresh pillars in the path of the primordial abyss-denizens.The Indian, however, had broken through these; so that Zamacona did not find his course impeded.It was an unconscious comfort to him to reflect that someone else from the outside world hadbeen there before—and the Indian’s careful descriptions had removed the elementof surprise and unexpectedness. More—Charging Buffalo’s knowledge of the tunnelhad led him to provide so good a torch supply for the journey in and out, that there would beno danger of becoming stranded in darkness. Zamacona camped twice, building a fire whose smokeseemed well taken care of by the natural ventilation.

At what he considered the end of the third day—though his co*cksure guessworkchronology is not at any time to be given the easy faith that he gave it—Zamacona encounteredthe prodigious descent and subsequent prodigious climb which Charging Buffalo had describedas the tunnel’s last phase. As at certain earlier points, marks of artificial improvementwere here discernible; and several times the steep gradient was eased by a flight of rough-hewnsteps. The torch shewed more and more of the monstrous carvings on the walls, and finally theresinous flare seemed mixed with a fainter and more diffusive light as Zamacona climbed up andup after the last downward stairway. At length the ascent ceased, and a level passage of artificialmasonry with dark, basaltic blocks led straight ahead. There was no need for a torch now, forall the air was glowing with a bluish, quasi-electric radiance that flickered like an aurora.It was the strange light of the inner world that the Indian had described—and in anothermoment Zamacona emerged from the tunnel upon a bleak, rocky hillside which climbed above himto a seething, impenetrable sky of bluish coruscations, and descended dizzily below him to anapparently illimitable plain shrouded in bluish mist.

He had come to the unknown world at last, and from his manuscript it is clearthat he viewed the formless landscape as proudly and exaltedly as ever his fellow-countrymanBalboa viewed the new-found Pacific from that unforgettable peak in Darien. Charging Buffalohad turned back at this point, driven by fear of something which he would only describe vaguelyand evasively as a herd of bad cattle, neither horse nor buffalo, but like the things the mound-spiritsrode at night—but Zamacona could not be deterred by any such trifle. Instead of fear,a strange sense of glory filled him; for he had imagination enough to know what it meant tostand alone in an inexplicable nether world whose existence no other white man suspected.

The soil of the great hill that surged upward behind him and spread steeplydownward below him was dark grey, rock-strown, without vegetation, and probably basaltic inorigin; with an unearthly cast which made him feel like an intruder on an alien planet. Thevast distant plain, thousands of feet below, had no features he could distinguish; especiallysince it appeared to be largely veiled in a curling, bluish vapour. But more than hill or plainor cloud, the bluely luminous, coruscating sky impressed the adventurer with a sense of supremewonder and mystery. What created this sky within a world he could not tell; though he knew ofthe northern lights, and had even seen them once or twice. He concluded that this subterraneouslight was something vaguely akin to the aurora; a view which moderns may well endorse, thoughit seems likely that certain phenomena of radio-activity may also enter in.

At Zamacona’s back the mouth of the tunnel he had traversed yawned darkly;defined by a stone doorway very like the one he had entered in the world above, save that itwas of greyish-black basalt instead of red sandstone. There were hideous sculptures, still ingood preservation and perhaps corresponding to those on the outer portal which time had largelyweathered away. The absence of weathering here argued a dry, temperate climate; indeed, theSpaniard already began to note the delightfully spring-like stability of temperature which marksthe air of the north’s interior. On the stone jambs were works proclaiming the bygonepresence of hinges, but of any actual door or gate no trace remained. Seating himself for restand thought, Zamacona lightened his pack by removing an amount of food and torches sufficientto take him back through the tunnel. These he proceeded to cache at the opening, under a cairnhastily formed of the rock fragments which everywhere lay around. Then, readjusting his lightenedpack, he commenced his descent toward the distant plain; preparing to invade a region whichno living thing of outer earth had penetrated in a century or more, which no white man had everpenetrated, and from which, if legend were to be believed, no organic creature had ever returnedsane.

Zamacona strode briskly along down the steep, interminable slope; his progresschecked at times by the bad walking that came from loose rock fragments, or by the excessiveprecipitousness of the grade. The distance of the mist-shrouded plain must have been enormous,for many hours’ walking brought him apparently no closer to it than he had been before.Behind him was always the great hill stretching upward into a bright aërial sea of bluishcoruscations. Silence was universal; so that his own footsteps, and the fall of stones thathe dislodged, struck on his ears with startling distinctness. It was at what he regarded asabout noon that he first saw the abnormal footprints which set him to thinking of Charging Buffalo’sterrible hints, precipitate flight, and strangely abiding terror.

The rock-strown nature of the soil gave few opportunities for tracks of anykind, but at one point a rather level interval had caused the loose detritus to accumulate ina ridge, leaving a considerable area of dark-grey loam absolutely bare. Here, in a ramblingconfusion indicating a large herd aimlessly wandering, Zamacona found the abnormal prints. Itis to be regretted that he could not describe them more exactly, but the manuscript displayedfar more vague fear than accurate observation. Just what it was that so frightened the Spaniardcan only be inferred from his later hints regarding the beasts. He referred to the prints as“not hooves, nor hands, nor feet, nor precisely paws—nor so large as to cause alarmon that account”. Just why or how long ago the things had been there, was not easy toguess. There was no vegetation visible, hence grazing was out of the question; but of courseif the beasts were carnivorous they might well have been hunting smaller animals, whose trackstheir own would tend to obliterate.

Glancing backward from this plateau to the heights above, Zamacona thoughthe detected traces of a great winding road which had once led from the tunnel downward to theplain. One could get the impression of this former highway only from a broad panoramic view,since a trickle of loose rock fragments had long ago obscured it; but the adventurer felt nonethe less certain that it had existed. It had not, probably, been an elaborately paved trunkroute; for the small tunnel it reached seemed scarcely like a main avenue to the outer world.In choosing a straight path of descent Zamacona had not followed its curving course, thoughhe must have crossed it once or twice. With his attention now called to it, he looked aheadto see if he could trace it downward toward the plain; and this he finally thought he coulddo. He resolved to investigate its surface when next he crossed it, and perhaps to pursue itsline for the rest of the way if he could distinguish it.

Having resumed his journey, Zamacona came some time later upon what he thoughtwas a bend of the ancient road. There were signs of grading and of some primal attempt at rock-surfacing,but not enough was left to make the route worth following. While rummaging about in the soilwith his sword, the Spaniard turned up something that glittered in the eternal blue daylight,and was thrilled at beholding a kind of coin or medal of a dark, unknown, lustrous metal, withhideous designs on each side. It was utterly and bafflingly alien to him, and from his descriptionI have no doubt but that it was a duplicate of the talisman given me by Grey Eagle almost fourcenturies afterward. Pocketing it after a long and curious examination, he strode onward; finallypitching camp at an hour which he guessed to be the evening of the outer world.

The next day Zamacona rose early and resumed his descent through this blue-littenworld of mist and desolation and preternatural silence. As he advanced, he at last became ableto distinguish a few objects on the distant plain below—trees, bushes, rocks, and a smallriver that came into view from the right and curved forward at a point to the left of his contemplatedcourse. This river seemed to be spanned by a bridge connected with the descending roadway, andwith care the explorer could trace the route of the road beyond it in a straight line over theplain. Finally he even thought he could detect towns scattered along the rectilinear ribbon;towns whose left-hand edges reached the river and sometimes crossed it. Where such crossingsoccurred, he saw as he descended, there were always signs of bridges either ruined or surviving.He was now in the midst of a sparse grassy vegetation, and saw that below him the growth becamethicker and thicker. The road was easier to define now, since its surface discouraged the grasswhich the looser soil supported. Rock fragments were less frequent, and the barren upward vistabehind him looked bleak and forbidding in contrast to his present milieu.

It was on this day that he saw the blurred mass moving over the distant plain.Since his first sight of the sinister footprints he had met with no more of these, but somethingabout that slowly and deliberately moving mass peculiarly sickened him. Nothing but a herd ofgrazing animals could move just like that, and after seeing the footprints he did not wish tomeet the things which had made them. Still, the moving mass was not near the road—andhis curiosity and greed for fabled gold were great. Besides, who could really judge things fromvague, jumbled footprints or from the panic-twisted hints of an ignorant Indian?

In straining his eyes to view the moving mass Zamacona became aware of severalother interesting things. One was that certain parts of the now unmistakable towns glitteredoddly in the misty blue light. Another was that, besides the towns, several similarly glitteringstructures of a more isolated sort were scattered here and there along the road and over theplain. They seemed to be embowered in clumps of vegetation, and those off the road had smallavenues leading to the highway. No smoke or other signs of life could be discerned about anyof the towns or buildings. Finally Zamacona saw that the plain was not infinite in extent, thoughthe half-concealing blue mists had hitherto made it seem so. It was bounded in the remote distanceby a range of low hills, toward a gap in which the river and roadway seemed to lead. All this—especiallythe glittering of certain pinnacles in the towns—had become very vivid when Zamacona pitchedhis second camp amidst the endless blue day. He likewise noticed the flocks of high-soaringbirds, whose nature he could not clearly make out.

The next afternoon—to use the language of the outer world as the manuscriptdid at all times—Zamacona reached the silent plain and crossed the soundless, slow-runningriver on a curiously carved and fairly well-preserved bridge of black basalt. The water wasclear, and contained large fishes of a wholly strange aspect. The roadway was now paved andsomewhat overgrown with weeds and creeping vines, and its course was occasionally outlined bysmall pillars bearing obscure symbols. On every side the grassy level extended, with here andthere a clump of trees or shrubbery, and with unidentifiable bluish flowers growing irregularlyover the whole area. Now and then some spasmodic motion of the grass indicated the presenceof serpents. In the course of several hours the traveller reached a grove of old and alien-lookingevergreen-trees which he knew, from distant viewing, protected one of the glittering-roofedisolated structures. Amidst the encroaching vegetation he saw the hideously sculptured pylonsof a stone gateway leading off the road, and was presently forcing his way through briers abovea moss-crusted tessellated walk lined with huge trees and low monolithic pillars.

At last, in this hushed green twilight, he saw the crumbling and ineffablyancient facade of the building—a temple, he had no doubt. It was a mass of nauseous bas-reliefs;depicting scenes and beings, objects and ceremonies, which could certainly have no place onthis or any sane planet. In hinting of these things Zamacona displays for the first time thatshocked and pious hesitancy which impairs the informative value of the rest of his manuscript.We cannot help regretting that the Catholic ardour of Renaissance Spain had so thoroughly permeatedhis thought and feeling. The door of the place stood wide open, and absolute darkness filledthe windowless interior. Conquering the repulsion which the mural sculptures had excited, Zamaconatook out flint and steel, lighted a resinous torch, pushed aside curtaining vines, and salliedboldly across the ominous threshold.

For a moment he was quite stupefied by what he saw. It was not the all-coveringdust and cobwebs of immemorial aeons, the fluttering winged things, the shriekingly loathsomesculptures on the walls, the bizarre form of the many basins and braziers, the sinister pyramidalaltar with the hollow top, or the monstrous, octopus-headed abnormality in some strange, darkmetal leering and squatting broodingly on its hieroglyphed pedestal, which robbed him of eventhe power to give a startled cry. It was nothing so unearthly as this—but merely the factthat, with the exception of the dust, the cobwebs, the winged things, and the gigantic emerald-eyedidol, every particle of substance in sight was composed of pure and evidently solid gold.

Even the manuscript, written in retrospect after Zamacona knew that gold isthe most common structural metal of a nether world containing limitless lodes and veins of it,reflects the frenzied excitement which the traveller felt upon suddenly finding the real sourceof all the Indian legends of golden cities. For a time the power of detailed observation lefthim, but in the end his faculties were recalled by a peculiar tugging sensation in the pocketof his doublet. Tracing the feeling, he realised that the disc of strange metal he had foundin the abandoned road was being attracted strongly by the vast octopus-headed, emerald-eyedidol on the pedestal, which he now saw to be composed of the same unknown exotic metal. He waslater to learn that this strange magnetic substance—as alien to the inner world as tothe outer world of men—is the one precious metal of the blue-lighted abyss. None knowswhat it is or where it occurs in Nature, and the amount of it on this planet came down fromthe stars with the people when great Tulu, the octopus-headed god, brought them for the firsttime to this earth. Certainly, its only known source was a stock of pre-existing artifacts,including multitudes of Cyclopean idols. It could never be placed or analysed, and even itsmagnetism was exerted only on its own kind. It was the supreme ceremonial metal of the hiddenpeople, its use being regulated by custom in such a way that its magnetic properties might causeno inconvenience. A very weakly magnetic alloy of it with such base metals as iron, gold, silver,copper, or zinc, had formed the sole monetary standard of the hidden people at one period oftheir history.

Zamacona’s reflections on the strange idol and its magnetism were disturbedby a tremendous wave of fear as, for the first time in this silent world, he heard a rumbleof very definite and obviously approaching sound. There was no mistaking its nature. It wasa thunderously charging herd of large animals; and, remembering the Indian’s panic, thefootprints, and the moving mass distantly seen, the Spaniard shuddered in terrified anticipation.He did not analyse his position, or the significance of this onrush of great lumbering beings,but merely responded to an elemental urge toward self-protection. Charging herds do not stopto find victims in obscure places, and on the outer earth Zamacona would have felt little orno alarm in such a massive, grove-girt edifice. Some instinct, however, now bred a deep andpeculiar terror in his soul; and he looked about frantically for any means of safety.

There being no available refuge in the great, gold-patined interior, he feltthat he must close the long-disused door; which still hung on its ancient hinges, doubled backagainst the inner wall. Soil, vines, and moss had entered the opening from outside, so thathe had to dig a path for the great gold portal with his sword; but he managed to perform thiswork very swiftly under the frightful stimulus of the approaching noise. The hoofbeats had grownstill louder and more menacing by the time he began tugging at the heavy door itself; and fora while his fears reached a frantic height, as hope of starting the age-clogged metal grew faint.Then, with a creak, the thing responded to his youthful strength, and a frenzied siege of pullingand pushing ensued. Amidst the roar of unseen stampeding feet success came at last, and theponderous golden door clanged shut, leaving Zamacona in darkness but for the single lightedtorch he had wedged between the pillars of a basin-tripod. There was a latch, and the frightenedman blessed his patron saint that it was still effective.

Sound alone told the fugitive the sequel. When the roar grew very near it resolveditself into separate footfalls, as if the evergreen grove had made it necessary for the herdto slacken speed and disperse. But feet continued to approach, and it became evident that thebeasts were advancing among the trees and circling the hideously carven temple walls. In thecurious deliberation of their tread Zamacona found something very alarming and repulsive, nordid he like the scuffling sounds which were audible even through the thick stone walls and heavygolden door. Once the door rattled ominously on its archaic hinges, as if under a heavy impact,but fortunately it still held. Then, after a seemingly endless interval, he heard retreatingsteps and realised that his unknown visitors were leaving. Since the herds did not seem to bevery numerous, it would have perhaps been safe to venture out within a half-hour or less; butZamacona took no chances. Opening his pack, he prepared his camp on the golden tiles of thetemple’s floor, with the great door still securely latched against all comers; driftingeventually into a sounder sleep than he could have known in the blue-litten spaces outside.He did not even mind the hellish, octopus-headed bulk of great Tulu, fashioned of unknown metaland leering with fishy, sea-green eyes, which squatted in the blackness above him on its monstrouslyhieroglyphed pedestal.

Surrounded by darkness for the first time since leaving the tunnel, Zamaconaslept profoundly and long. He must have more than made up the sleep he had lost at his two previouscamps, when the ceaseless glare of the sky had kept him awake despite his fatigue, for muchdistance was covered by other living feet while he lay in his healthily dreamless rest. It iswell that he rested deeply, for there were many strange things to be encountered in his nextperiod of consciousness.

IV.

What finally roused Zamacona was a thunderous rapping at the door. It beatthrough his dreams and dissolved all the lingering mists of drowsiness as soon as he knew whatit was. There could be no mistake about it—it was a definite, human, and peremptory rapping;performed apparently with some metallic object, and with all the measured quality of consciousthought or will behind it. As the awakening man rose clumsily to his feet, a sharp vocal notewas added to the summons—someone calling out, in a not unmusical voice, a formula whichthe manuscript tries to represent as “oxi, oxi, giathcán ycá relex”.Feeling sure that his visitors were men and not daemons, and arguing that they could have noreason for considering him an enemy, Zamacona decided to face them openly and at once; and accordinglyfumbled with the ancient latch till the golden door creaked open from the pressure of thoseoutside.

As the great portal swung back, Zamacona stood facing a group of about twentyindividuals of an aspect not calculated to give him alarm. They seemed to be Indians; thoughtheir tasteful robes and trappings and swords were not such as he had seen among any of thetribes of the outer world, while their faces had many subtle differences from the Indian type.That they did not mean to be irresponsibly hostile, was very clear; for instead of menacinghim in any way they merely probed him attentively and significantly with their eyes, as if theyexpected their gaze to open up some sort of communication. The longer they gazed, the more heseemed to know about them and their mission; for although no one had spoken since the vocalsummons before the opening of the door, he found himself slowly realising that they had comefrom the great city beyond the low hills, mounted on animals, and that they had been summonedby animals who had reported his presence; that they were not sure what kind of person he wasor just where he had come from, but that they knew he must be associated with that dimly rememberedouter world which they sometimes visited in curious dreams. How he read all this in the gazeof the two or three leaders he could not possibly explain; though he learned why a moment later.

As it was, he attempted to address his visitors in the Wichita dialect he hadpicked up from Charging Buffalo; and after this failed to draw a vocal reply he successivelytried the Aztec, Spanish, French, and Latin tongues—adding as many scraps of lame Greek,Galician, and Portuguese, and of the Bable peasant patois of his native Asturias, as his memorycould recall. But not even this polyglot array—his entire linguistic stock—couldbring a reply in kind. When, however, he paused in perplexity, one of the visitors began speakingin an utterly strange and rather fascinating language whose sounds the Spaniard later had muchdifficulty in representing on paper. Upon his failure to understand this, the speaker pointedfirst to his own eyes, then to his forehead, and then to his eyes again, as if commanding theother to gaze at him in order to absorb what he wanted to transmit.

Zamacona, obeying, found himself rapidly in possession of certain information.The people, he learned, conversed nowadays by means of unvocal radiations of thought; althoughthey had formerly used a spoken language which still survived as the written tongue, and intowhich they still dropped orally for tradition’s sake, or when strong feeling demandeda spontaneous outlet. He could understand them merely by concentrating his attention upon theireyes; and could reply by summoning up a mental image of what he wished to say, and throwingthe substance of this into his glance. When the thought-speaker paused, apparently invitinga response, Zamacona tried his best to follow the prescribed pattern, but did not appear tosucceed very well. So he nodded, and tried to describe himself and his journey by signs. Hepointed upward, as if to the outer world, then closed his eyes and made signs as of a mole burrowing.Then he opened his eyes again and pointed downward, in order to indicate his descent of thegreat slope. Experimentally he blended a spoken word or two with his gestures—for example,pointing successively to himself and to all of his visitors and saying “un hombre”,and then pointing to himself alone and very carefully pronouncing his individual name, Pánfilode Zamacona.

Before the strange conversation was over, a good deal of data had passed inboth directions. Zamacona had begun to learn how to throw his thoughts, and had likewise pickedup several words of the region’s archaic spoken language. His visitors, moreover, hadabsorbed many beginnings of an elementary Spanish vocabulary. Their own old language was utterlyunlike anything the Spaniard had ever heard, though there were times later on when he was tofancy an infinitely remote linkage with the Aztec, as if the latter represented some far stageof corruption, or some very thin infiltration of loan-words. The underground world, Zamaconalearned, bore an ancient name which the manuscript records as “Xinaián”,but which, from the writer’s supplementary explanations and diacritical marks, could probablybe best represented to Anglo-Saxon ears by the phonetic arrangement K’n-yan.

It is not surprising that this preliminary discourse did not go beyond themerest essentials, but those essentials were highly important. Zamacona learned that the peopleof K’n-yan were almost infinitely ancient, and that they had come from a distant partof space where physical conditions are much like those of the earth. All this, of course, waslegend now; and one could not say how much truth was in it, or how much worship was really dueto the octopus-headed being Tulu who had traditionally brought them hither and whom they stillreverenced for aesthetic reasons. But they knew of the outer world, and were indeed the originalstock who had peopled it as soon as its crust was fit to live on. Between glacial ages theyhad had some remarkable surface civilisations, especially one at the South Pole near the mountainKadath.

At some time infinitely in the past most of the outer world had sunk beneaththe ocean, so that only a few refugees remained to bear the news to K’n-yan. This wasundoubtedly due to the wrath of space-devils hostile alike to men and to men’s gods—forit bore out rumours of a primordially earlier sinking which had submerged the gods themselves,including great Tulu, who still lay prisoned and dreaming in the watery vaults of the half-cosmiccity Relex. No man not a slave of the space-devils, it was argued, could live long on the outerearth; and it was decided that all beings who remained there must be evilly connected. Accordinglytraffic with the lands of sun and starlight abruptly ceased. The subterraneous approaches toK’n-yan, or such as could be remembered, were either blocked up or carefully guarded;and all encroachers were treated as dangerous spies and enemies.

But this was long ago. With the passing of ages fewer and fewer visitors cameto K’n-yan, and eventually sentries ceased to be maintained at the unblocked approaches.The mass of the people forgot, except through distorted memories and myths and some very singulardreams, that an outer world existed; though educated folk never ceased to recall the essentialfacts. The last visitors ever recorded—centuries in the past—had not even been treatedas devil-spies; faith in the old legendry having long before died out. They had been questionedeagerly about the fabulous outer regions; for scientific curiosity in K’n-yan was keen,and the myths, memories, dreams, and historical fragments relating to the earth’s surfacehad often tempted scholars to the brink of an external expedition which they had not quite daredto attempt. The only thing demanded of such visitors was that they refrain from going back andinforming the outer world of K’n-yan’s positive existence; for after all, one couldnot be sure about these outer lands. They coveted gold and silver, and might prove highly troublesomeintruders. Those who had obeyed the injunction had lived happily, though regrettably briefly,and had told all they could about their world—little enough, however, since their accountswere all so fragmentary and conflicting that one could hardly tell what to believe and whatto doubt. One wished that more of them would come. As for those who disobeyed and tried to escape—itwas very unfortunate about them. Zamacona himself was very welcome, for he appeared to be ahigher-grade man, and to know much more about the outer world, than anyone else who had comedown within memory. He could tell them much—and they hoped he would be reconciled to hislife-long stay.

Many things which Zamacona learned about K’n-yan in that first colloquyleft him quite breathless. He learned, for instance, that during the past few thousand yearsthe phenomena of old age and death had been conquered; so that men no longer grew feeble ordied except through violence or will. By regulating the system, one might be as physiologicallyyoung and immortal as he wished; and the only reason why any allowed themselves to age, wasthat they enjoyed the sensation in a world where stagnation and commonplaceness reigned. Theycould easily become young again when they felt like it. Births had ceased, except for experimentalpurposes, since a large population had been found needless by a master-race which controlledNature and organic rivals alike. Many, however, chose to die after a while; since despite thecleverest efforts to invent new pleasures, the ordeal of consciousness became too dull for sensitivesouls—especially those in whom time and satiation had blinded the primal instincts andemotions of self-preservation. All the members of the group before Zamacona were from 500 to1500 years old; and several had seen surface visitors before, though time had blurred the recollection.These visitors, by the way, had often tried to duplicate the longevity of the underground race;but had been able to do so only fractionally, owing to evolutionary differences developing duringthe million or two years of cleavage.

These evolutionary differences were even more strikingly shewn in another particular—onefar stranger than the wonder of immortality itself. This was the ability of the people of K’n-yanto regulate the balance between matter and abstract energy, even where the bodies of livingorganic beings were concerned, by the sheer force of the technically trained will. In otherwords, with suitable effort a learned man of K’n-yan could dematerialise and rematerialisehimself—or, with somewhat greater effort and subtler technique, any other object he chose;reducing solid matter to free external particles and recombining the particles again withoutdamage. Had not Zamacona answered his visitors’ knock when he did, he would have discoveredthis accomplishment in a highly puzzling way; for only the strain and bother of the processprevented the twenty men from passing bodily through the golden door without pausing for a summons.This art was much older than the art of perpetual life; and it could be taught to some extent,though never perfectly, to any intelligent person. Rumours of it had reached the outer worldin past aeons; surviving in secret traditions and ghostly legendry. The men of K’n-yanhad been amused by the primitive and imperfect spirit tales brought down by outer-world stragglers.In practical life this principle had certain industrial applications, but was generally sufferedto remain neglected through lack of any particular incentive to its use. Its chief survivingform was in connexion with sleep, when for excitement’s sake many dream-connoisseurs resortedto it to enhance the vividness of their visionary wanderings. By the aid of this method certaindreamers even paid half-material visits to a strange, nebulous realm of mounds and valleys andvarying light which some believed to be the forgotten outer world. They would go thither ontheir beasts, and in an age of peace live over the old, glorious battles of their forefathers.Some philosophers thought that in such cases they actually coalesced with immaterial forcesleft behind by these warlike ancestors themselves.

The people of K’n-yan all dwelt in the great, tall city of Tsath beyondthe mountains. Formerly several races of them had inhabited the entire underground world, whichstretched down to unfathomable abysses and which included besides the blue-litten region a red-littenregion called Yoth, where relics of a still older and non-human race were found by archaeologists.In the course of time, however, the men of Tsath had conquered and enslaved the rest; interbreedingthem with certain horned and four-footed animals of the red-litten region, whose semi-humanleanings were very peculiar, and which, though containing a certain artificially created element,may have been in part the degenerate descendants of those peculiar entities who had left therelics. As aeons passed, and mechanical discoveries made the business of life extremely easy,a concentration of the people of Tsath took place; so that all the rest of K’n-yan becamerelatively deserted.

It was easier to live in one place, and there was no object in maintaininga population of overflowing proportions. Many of the old mechanical devices were still in use,though others had been abandoned when it was seen that they failed to give pleasure, or thatthey were not necessary for a race of reduced numbers whose mental force could govern an extensivearray of inferior and semi-human industrial organisms. This extensive slave-class was highlycomposite, being bred from ancient conquered enemies, from outer-world stragglers, from deadbodies curiously galvanised into effectiveness, and from the naturally inferior members of theruling race of Tsath. The ruling type itself had become highly superior through selective breedingand social evolution—the nation having passed through a period of idealistic industrialdemocracy which gave equal opportunities to all, and thus, by raising the naturally intelligentto power, drained the masses of all their brains and stamina. Industry, being found fundamentallyfutile except for the supplying of basic needs and the gratification of inescapable yearnings,had become very simple. Physical comfort was ensured by an urban mechanisation of standardisedand easily maintained pattern, and other elemental needs were supplied by scientific agricultureand stock-raising. Long travel was abandoned, and people went back to using the horned, half-humanbeasts instead of maintaining the profusion of gold, silver, and steel transportation machineswhich had once threaded land, water, and air. Zamacona could scarcely believe that such thingshad ever existed outside dreams, but was told he could see specimens of them in museums. Hecould also see the ruins of other vast magical devices by travelling a day’s journey tothe valley of Do-Hna, to which the race had spread during its period of greatest numbers. Thecities and temples of this present plain were of a far more archaic period, and had never beenother than religious and antiquarian shrines during the supremacy of the men of Tsath.

In government, Tsath was a kind of communistic or semi-anarchical state; habitrather than law determining the daily order of things. This was made possible by the age-oldexperience and paralysing ennui of the race, whose wants and needs were limited to physicalfundamentals and to new sensations. An aeon-long tolerance not yet undermined by growing reactionhad abolished all illusions of values and principles, and nothing but an approximation to customwas ever sought or expected. To see that the mutual encroachments of pleasure-seeking nevercrippled the mass life of the community—this was all that was desired. Family organisationhad long ago perished, and the civil and social distinction of the sexes had disappeared. Dailylife was organised in ceremonial patterns; with games, intoxication, torture of slaves, day-dreaming,gastronomic and emotional orgies, religious exercises, exotic experiments, artistic and philosophicaldiscussions, and the like, as the principal occupations. Property—chiefly land, slaves,animals, shares in the common city enterprise of Tsath, and ingots of magnetic Tulu-metal, theformer universal money standard—was allocated on a very complex basis which included acertain amount equally divided among all the freemen. Poverty was unknown, and labour consistedonly of certain administrative duties imposed by an intricate system of testing and selection.Zamacona found difficulty in describing conditions so unlike anything he had previously known;and the text of his manuscript proved unusually puzzling at this point.

Art and intellect, it appeared, had reached very high levels in Tsath; buthad become listless and decadent. The dominance of machinery had at one time broken up the growthof normal aesthetics, introducing a lifelessly geometrical tradition fatal to sound expression.This had soon been outgrown, but had left its mark upon all pictorial and decorative attempts;so that except for conventionalised religious designs, there was little depth or feeling inany later work. Archaistic reproductions of earlier work had been found much preferable forgeneral enjoyment. Literature was all highly individual and analytical, so much so as to bewholly incomprehensible to Zamacona. Science had been profound and accurate, and all-embracingsave in the one direction of astronomy. Of late, however, it was falling into decay, as peoplefound it increasingly useless to tax their minds by recalling its maddening infinitude of detailsand ramifications. It was thought more sensible to abandon the deepest speculations and to confinephilosophy to conventional forms. Technology, of course, could be carried on by rule of thumb.History was more and more neglected, but exact and copious chronicles of the past existed inthe libraries. It was still an interesting subject, and there would be a vast number to rejoiceat the fresh outer-world knowledge brought in by Zamacona. In general, though, the modern tendencywas to feel rather than to think; so that men were now more highly esteemed for inventing newdiversions than for preserving old facts or pushing back the frontier of cosmic mystery.

Religion was a leading interest in Tsath, though very few actually believedin the supernatural. What was desired was the aesthetic and emotional exaltation bred by themystical moods and sensuous rites which attended the colourful ancestral faith. Temples to GreatTulu, a spirit of universal harmony anciently symbolised as the octopus-headed god who had broughtall men down from the stars, were the most richly constructed objects in all K’n-yan;while the cryptic shrines of Yig, the principle of life symbolised as the Father of all Serpents,were almost as lavish and remarkable. In time Zamacona learned much of the orgies and sacrificesconnected with this religion, but seemed piously reluctant to describe them in his manuscript.He himself never participated in any of the rites save those which he mistook for perversionsof his own faith; nor did he ever lose an opportunity to try to convert the people to that faithof the Cross which the Spaniards hoped to make universal.

Prominent in the contemporary religion of Tsath was a revived and almost genuineveneration for the rare, sacred metal of Tulu—that dark, lustrous, magnetic stuff which wasnowhere found in Nature, but which had always been with men in the form of idols and hieraticimplements. From the earliest times any sight of it in its unalloyed form had impelled respect,while all the sacred archives and litanies were kept in cylinders wrought of its purest substance.Now, as the neglect of science and intellect was dulling the critically analytical spirit, peoplewere beginning to weave around the metal once more that same fabric of awestruck superstitionwhich had existed in primitive times.

Another function of religion was the regulation of the calendar, born of aperiod when time and speed were regarded as prime fetiches in man’s emotional life. Periodsof alternate waking and sleeping, prolonged, abridged, and inverted as mood and conveniencedictated, and timed by the tail-beats of Great Yig, the Serpent, corresponded very roughly toterrestrial days and nights; though Zamacona’s sensations told him they must actuallybe almost twice as long. The year-unit, measured by Yig’s annual shedding of his skin,was equal to about a year and a half of the outer world. Zamacona thought he had mastered thiscalendar very well when he wrote his manuscript, whence the confidently given date of 1545;but the document failed to suggest that his assurance in this matter was fully justified.

As the spokesman of the Tsath party proceeded with his information, Zamaconafelt a growing repulsion and alarm. It was not only what was told, but the strange, telepathicmanner of telling, and the plain inference that return to the outer world would be impossible,that made the Spaniard wish he had never descended to this region of magic, abnormality, anddecadence. But he knew that nothing but friendly acquiescence would do as a policy, hence decidedto coöperate in all his visitors’ plans and furnish all the information they mightdesire. They, on their part, were fascinated by the outer-world data which he managed haltinglyto convey.

It was really the first draught of reliable surface information they had hadsince the refugees straggled back from Atlantis and Lemuria aeons before, for all their subsequentemissaries from outside had been members of narrow and local groups without any knowledge ofthe world at large—Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs at best, and mostly ignorant tribes of theplains. Zamacona was the first European they had ever seen, and the fact that he was a youthof education and brilliancy made him of still more emphatic value as a source of knowledge.The visiting party shewed their breathless interest in all he contrived to convey, and it wasplain that his coming would do much to relieve the flagging interest of weary Tsath in mattersof geography and history.

The only thing which seemed to displease the men of Tsath was the fact thatcurious and adventurous strangers were beginning to pour into those parts of the upper worldwhere the passages to K’n-yan lay. Zamacona told them of the founding of Florida and NewSpain, and made it clear that a great part of the world was stirring with the zest of adventure—Spanish,Portuguese, French, and English. Sooner or later Mexico and Florida must meet in one great colonialempire—and then it would be hard to keep outsiders from the rumoured gold and silver ofthe abyss. Charging Buffalo knew of Zamacona’s journey into the earth. Would he tell Coronado,or somehow let a report get to the great viceroy, when he failed to find the traveller at thepromised meeting-place? Alarm for the continued secrecy and safety of K’n-yan shewed inthe faces of the visitors, and Zamacona absorbed from their minds the fact that from now onsentries would undoubtedly be posted once more at all the unblocked passages to the outsideworld which the men of Tsath could remember.

V.

The long conversation of Zamacona and his visitors took place in the green-bluetwilight of the grove just outside the temple door. Some of the men reclined on the weeds andmoss beside the half-vanished walk, while others, including the Spaniard and the chief spokesmanof the Tsath party, sat on the occasional low monolithic pillars that lined the temple approach.Almost a whole terrestrial day must have been consumed in the colloquy, for Zamacona felt theneed of food several times, and ate from his well-stocked pack while some of the Tsath partywent back for provisions to the roadway, where they had left the animals on which they had ridden.At length the prime leader of the party brought the discourse to a close, and indicated thatthe time had come to proceed to the city.

There were, he affirmed, several extra beasts in the cavalcade, upon one ofwhich Zamacona could ride. The prospect of mounting one of those ominous hybrid entities whosefabled nourishment was so alarming, and a single sight of which had set Charging Buffalo intosuch a frenzy of flight, was by no means reassuring to the traveller. There was, moreover, anotherpoint about the things which disturbed him greatly—the apparently preternatural intelligencewith which some members of the previous day’s roving pack had reported his presence tothe men of Tsath and brought out the present expedition. But Zamacona was not a coward, hencefollowed the men boldly down the weed-grown walk toward the road where the things were stationed.

And yet he could not refrain from crying out in terror at what he saw whenhe passed through the great vine-draped pylons and emerged upon the ancient road. He did notwonder that the curious Wichita had fled in panic, and had to close his eyes a moment to retainhis sanity. It is unfortunate that some sense of pious reticence prevented him from describingfully in his manuscript the nameless sight he saw. As it is, he merely hinted at the shockingmorbidity of these great floundering white things, with black fur on their backs, a rudimentaryhorn in the centre of their foreheads, and an unmistakable trace of human or anthropoid bloodin their flat-nosed, bulging-lipped faces. They were, he declared later in his manuscript, themost terrible objective entities he ever saw in his life, either in K’n-yan or in theouter world. And the specific quality of their supreme terror was something apart from any easilyrecognisable or describable feature. The main trouble was that they were not wholly productsof Nature.

The party observed Zamacona’s fright, and hastened to reassure him asmuch as possible. The beasts or gyaa-yothn, they explained, surely were curious things;but were really very harmless. The flesh they ate was not that of intelligent people of themaster-race, but merely that of a special slave-class which had for the most part ceased tobe thoroughly human, and which indeed was the principal meat stock of K’n-yan. They—ortheir principal ancestral element—had first been found in a wild state amidst the Cyclopeanruins of the deserted red-litten world of Yoth which lay below the blue-litten world of K’n-yan.That part of them was human, seemed quite clear; but men of science could never decide whetherthey were actually the descendants of the bygone entities who had lived and reigned in the strangeruins. The chief ground for such a supposition was the well-known fact that the vanished inhabitantsof Yoth had been quadrupedal. This much was known from the very few manuscripts and carvingsfound in the vaults of Zin, beneath the largest ruined city of Yoth. But it was also known fromthese manuscripts that the beings of Yoth had possessed the art of synthetically creating life,and had made and destroyed several efficiently designed races of industrial and transportationalanimals in the course of their history—to say nothing of concocting all manner of fantasticliving shapes for the sake of amusem*nt and new sensations during the long period of decadence.The beings of Yoth had undoubtedly been reptilian in affiliations, and most physiologists ofTsath agreed that the present beasts had been very much inclined toward reptilianism beforethey had been crossed with the mammal slave-class of K’n-yan.

It argues well for the intrepid fire of those Renaissance Spaniards who conqueredhalf the unknown world, that Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez actually mounted oneof the morbid beasts of Tsath and fell into place beside the leader of the cavalcade—theman named Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn, who had been most active in the previous exchange of information.It was a repulsive business; but after all, the seat was very easy, and the gait of the clumsygyaa-yoth surprisingly even and regular. No saddle was necessary, and the animal appearedto require no guidance whatever. The procession moved forward at a brisk gait, stopping onlyat certain abandoned cities and temples about which Zamacona was curious, and which Gll’-Hthaa-Ynnwas obligingly ready to display and explain. The largest of these towns, B’graa, was amarvel of finely wrought gold, and Zamacona studied the curiously ornate architecture with avidinterest. Buildings tended toward height and slenderness, with roofs bursting into a multitudeof pinnacles. The streets were narrow, curving, and occasionally picturesquely hilly, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynnsaid that the later cities of K’n-yan were far more spacious and regular in design. Allthese old cities of the plain shewed traces of levelled walls—reminders of the archaicdays when they had been successively conquered by the now dispersed armies of Tsath.

There was one object along the route which Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn exhibited onhis own initiative, even though it involved a detour of about a mile along a vine-tangled sidepath. This was a squat, plain temple of black basalt blocks without a single carving, and containingonly a vacant onyx pedestal. The remarkable thing about it was its story, for it was a linkwith a fabled elder world compared to which even cryptic Yoth was a thing of yesterday. It hadbeen built in imitation of certain temples depicted in the vaults of Zin, to house a very terribleblack toad-idol found in the red-litten world and called Tsathoggua in the Yothic manuscripts.It had been a potent and widely worshipped god, and after its adoption by the people of K’n-yanhad lent its name to the city which was later to become dominant in that region. Yothic legendsaid that it had come from a mysterious inner realm beneath the red-litten world—a blackrealm of peculiar-sensed beings which had no light at all, but which had had great civilisationsand mighty gods before ever the reptilian quadrupeds of Yoth had come into being. Many imagesof Tsathoggua existed in Yoth, all of which were alleged to have come from the black inner realm,and which were supposed by Yothic archaeologists to represent the aeon-extinct race of thatrealm. The black realm called N’kai in the Yothic manuscripts had been explored as thoroughlyas possible by these archaeologists, and singular stone troughs or burrows had excited infinitespeculation.

When the men of K’n-yan discovered the red-litten world and decipheredits strange manuscripts, they took over the Tsathoggua cult and brought all the frightful toadimages up to the land of blue light—housing them in shrines of Yoth-quarried basalt likethe one Zamacona now saw. The cult flourished until it almost rivalled the ancient cults ofYig and Tulu, and one branch of the race even took it to the outer world, where the smallestof the images eventually found a shrine at Olathoë, in the land of Lomar near the earth’snorth pole. It was rumoured that this outer-world cult survived even after the great ice-sheetand the hairy Gnophkehs destroyed Lomar, but of such matters not much was definitely known inK’n-yan. In that world of blue light the cult came to an abrupt end, even though the nameof Tsath was suffered to remain.

What ended the cult was the partial exploration of the black realm of N’kaibeneath the red-litten world of Yoth. According to the Yothic manuscripts, there was no survivinglife in N’kai, but something must have happened in the aeons between the days of Yothand the coming of men to the earth; something perhaps not unconnected with the end of Yoth.Probably it had been an earthquake, opening up lower chambers of the lightless world which hadbeen closed against the Yothic archaeologists; or perhaps some more frightful juxtapositionof energy and electrons, wholly inconceivable to any sort of vertebrate minds, had taken place.At any rate, when the men of K’n-yan went down into N’kai’s black abyss withtheir great atom-power searchlights they found living things—living things that oozedalong stone channels and worshipped onyx and basalt images of Tsathoggua. But they were nottoads like Tsathoggua himself. Far worse—they were amorphous lumps of viscous black slimethat took temporary shapes for various purposes. The explorers of K’n-yan did not pausefor detailed observations, and those who escaped alive sealed the passage leading from red-littenYoth down into the gulfs of nether horror. Then all the images of Tsathoggua in the land ofK’n-yan were dissolved into the ether by disintegrating rays, and the cult was abolishedforever.

Aeons later, when naive fears were outgrown and supplanted by scientific curiosity,the old legends of Tsathoggua and N’kai were recalled, and a suitably armed and equippedexploring party went down to Yoth to find the closed gate of the black abyss and see what mightstill lie beneath. But they could not find the gate, nor could any man ever do so in all theages that followed. Nowadays there were those who doubted that any abyss had ever existed, butthe few scholars who could still decipher the Yothic manuscripts believed that the evidencefor such a thing was adequate, even though the middle records of K’n-yan, with accountsof the one frightful expedition into N’kai, were more open to question. Some of the laterreligious cults tried to suppress remembrance of N’kai’s existence, and attachedsevere penalties to its mention; but these had not begun to be taken seriously at the time ofZamacona’s advent to K’n-yan.

As the cavalcade returned to the old highway and approached the low range ofmountains, Zamacona saw that the river was very close on the left. Somewhat later, as the terrainrose, the stream entered a gorge and passed through the hills, while the road traversed thegap at a rather higher level close to the brink. It was about this time that light rainfallcame. Zamacona noticed the occasional drops and drizzle, and looked up at the coruscating blueair, but there was no diminution of the strange radiance. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn then told himthat such condensations and precipitations of water-vapour were not uncommon, and that theynever dimmed the glare of the vault above. A kind of mist, indeed, always hung about the lowlandsof K’n-yan, and compensated for the complete absence of true clouds.

The slight rise of the mountain pass enabled Zamacona, by looking behind, tosee the ancient and deserted plain in panorama as he had seen it from the other side. He seemsto have appreciated its strange beauty, and to have vaguely regretted leaving it; for he speaksof being urged by Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn to drive his beast more rapidly. When he faced frontwardagain he saw that the crest of the road was very near; the weed-grown way leading starkly upand ending against a blank void of blue light. The scene was undoubtedly highly impressive—asteep green mountain wall on the right, a deep river-chasm on the left with another green mountainwall beyond it, and ahead, the churning sea of bluish coruscations into which the upward pathdissolved. Then came the crest itself, and with it the world of Tsath outspread in a stupendousforward vista.

Zamacona caught his breath at the great sweep of peopled landscape, for itwas a hive of settlement and activity beyond anything he had ever seen or dreamed of. The downwardslope of the hill itself was relatively thinly strown with small farms and occasional temples;but beyond it lay an enormous plain covered like a chess board with planted trees, irrigatedby narrow canals cut from the river, and threaded by wide, geometrically precise roads of goldor basalt blocks. Great silver cables borne aloft on golden pillars linked the low, spreadingbuildings and clusters of buildings which rose here and there, and in some places one couldsee lines of partly ruinous pillars without cables. Moving objects shewed the fields to be undertillage, and in some cases Zamacona saw that men were ploughing with the aid of the repulsive,half-human quadrupeds.

But most impressive of all was the bewildering vision of clustered spires andpinnacles which rose afar off across the plain and shimmered flower-like and spectral in thecoruscating blue light. At first Zamacona thought it was a mountain covered with houses andtemples, like some of the picturesque hill cities of his own Spain, but a second glance shewedhim that it was not indeed such. It was a city of the plain, but fashioned of such heaven-reachingtowers that its outline was truly that of a mountain. Above it hung a curious greyish haze,through which the blue light glistened and took added overtones of radiance from the milliongolden minarets. Glancing at Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn, Zamacona knew that this was the monstrous,gigantic, and omnipotent city of Tsath.

As the road turned downward toward the plain, Zamacona felt a kind of uneasinessand sense of evil. He did not like the beast he rode, or the world that could provide such abeast, and he did not like the atmosphere that brooded over the distant city of Tsath. Whenthe cavalcade began to pass occasional farms, the Spaniard noticed the forms that worked inthe fields; and did not like their motions and proportions, or the mutilations he saw on mostof them. Moreover, he did not like the way that some of these forms were herded in corrals,or the way they grazed on the heavy verdure. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn indicated that these beingswere members of the slave-class, and that their acts were controlled by the master of the farm,who gave them hypnotic impressions in the morning of all they were to do during the day. Assemi-conscious machines, their industrial efficiency was nearly perfect. Those in the corralswere inferior specimens, classified merely as livestock.

Upon reaching the plain, Zamacona saw the larger farms and noted the almosthuman work performed by the repulsive horned gyaa-yothn. He likewise observed the more manlikeshapes that toiled along the furrows, and felt a curious fright and disgust toward certain ofthem whose motions were more mechanical than those of the rest. These, Gll’-Hthaa-Ynnexplained, were what men called the y’m-bhi—organisms which had died, butwhich had been mechanically reanimated for industrial purposes by means of atomic energy andthought-power. The slave-class did not share the immortality of the freemen of Tsath, so thatwith time the number of y’m-bhi had become very large. They were dog-like and faithful,but not so readily amenable to thought-commands as were living slaves. Those which most repelledZamacona were those whose mutilations were greatest; for some were wholly headless, while othershad suffered singular and seemingly capricious subtractions, distortions, transpositions, andgraftings in various places. The Spaniard could not account for this condition, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynnmade it clear that these were slaves who had been used for the amusem*nt of the people in someof the vast arenas; for the men of Tsath were connoisseurs of delicate sensation, and requireda constant supply of fresh and novel stimuli for their jaded impulses. Zamacona, though by nomeans squeamish, was not favourably impressed by what he saw and heard.

Approached more closely, the vast metropolis became dimly horrible in its monstrousextent and inhuman height. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn explained that the upper parts of the greattowers were no longer used, and that many had been taken down to avoid the bother of maintenance.The plain around the original urban area was covered with newer and smaller dwellings, whichin many cases were preferred to the ancient towers. From the whole mass of gold and stone amonotonous roar of activity droned outward over the plain, while cavalcades and streams of wagonswere constantly entering and leaving over the great gold- or stone-paved roads.

Several times Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn paused to shew Zamacona some particularobject of interest, especially the temples of Yig, Tulu, Nug, Yeb, and the Not-to-Be-Named Onewhich lined the road at infrequent intervals, each in its embowering grove according to thecustom of K’n-yan. These temples, unlike those of the deserted plain beyond the mountains,were still in active use; large parties of mounted worshippers coming and going in constantstreams. Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn took Zamacona into each of them, and the Spaniard watched thesubtle orgiastic rites with fascination and repulsion. The ceremonies of Nug and Yeb sickenedhim especially—so much, indeed, that he refrained from describing them in his manuscript.One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered, but it had been turned into a shrineof Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity was a kindof sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious.What he liked least of all were the emotional sounds emitted by the celebrants—jarringsounds in a race that had ceased to use vocal speech for ordinary purposes.

Close to the compact outskirts of Tsath, and well within the shadow of itsterrifying towers, Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn pointed out a monstrous circular building before whichenormous crowds were lined up. This, he indicated, was one of the many amphitheatres where curioussports and sensations were provided for the weary people of K’n-yan. He was about to pauseand usher Zamacona inside the vast curved facade, when the Spaniard, recalling the mutilatedforms he had seen in the fields, violently demurred. This was the first of those friendly clashesof taste which were to convince the people of Tsath that their guest followed strange and narrowstandards.

Tsath itself was a network of strange and ancient streets; and despite a growingsense of horror and alienage, Zamacona was enthralled by its intimations of mystery and cosmicwonder. The dizzy giganticism of its overawing towers, the monstrous surge of teeming life throughits ornate avenues, the curious carvings on its doorways and windows, the odd vistas glimpsedfrom balustraded plazas and tiers of titan terraces, and the enveloping grey haze which seemedto press down on the gorge-like streets in low ceiling-fashion, all combined to produce sucha sense of adventurous expectancy as he had never known before. He was taken at once to a councilof executives which held forth in a gold-and-copper palace behind a gardened and fountainedpark, and was for some time subjected to close, friendly questioning in a vaulted hall frescoedwith vertiginous arabesques. Much was expected of him, he could see, in the way of historicalinformation about the outside earth; but in return all the mysteries of K’n-yan wouldbe unveiled to him. The one great drawback was the inexorable ruling that he might never returnto the world of sun and stars and Spain which was his.

A daily programme was laid down for the visitor, with time apportioned judiciouslyamong several kinds of activities. There were to be conversations with persons of learning invarious places, and lessons in many branches of Tsathic lore. Liberal periods of research wereallowed for, and all the libraries of K’n-yan both secular and sacred were to be thrownopen to him as soon as he might master the written languages. Rites and spectacles were to beattended—except when he might especially object—and much time would be left forthe enlightened pleasure-seeking and emotional titillation which formed the goal and nucleusof daily life. A house in the suburbs or an apartment in the city would be assigned him, andhe would be initiated into one of the large affection-groups, including many noblewomen of themost extreme and art-enhanced beauty, which in latter-day K’n-yan took the place of familyunits. Several horned gyaa-yothn would be provided for his transportation and errand-running,and ten living slaves of intact body would serve to conduct his establishment and protect himfrom thieves and sad*sts and religious orgiasts on the public highways. There were many mechanicaldevices which he must learn to use, but Gll’-Hthaa-Ynn would instruct him immediatelyregarding the principal ones.

Upon his choosing an apartment in preference to a suburban villa, Zamaconawas dismissed by the executives with great courtesy and ceremony, and was led through severalgorgeous streets to a cliff-like carven structure of some seventy or eighty floors. Preparationsfor his arrival had already been instituted, and in a spacious ground-floor suite of vaultedrooms slaves were busy adjusting hangings and furniture. There were lacquered and inlaid tabourets,velvet and silk reclining-corners and squatting-cushions, and infinite rows of teakwood andebony pigeon-holes with metal cylinders containing some of the manuscripts he was soon to read—standardclassics which all urban apartments possessed. Desks with great stacks of membrane-paper andpots of the prevailing green pigment were in every room—each with graded sets of pigmentbrushes and other odd bits of stationery. Mechanical writing devices stood on ornate goldentripods, while over all was shed a brilliant blue light from energy-globes set in the ceiling.There were windows, but at this shadowy ground-level they were of scant illuminating value.In some of the rooms were elaborate baths, while the kitchen was a maze of technical contrivances.Supplies were brought, Zamacona was told, through the network of underground passages whichlay beneath Tsath, and which had once accommodated curious mechanical transports. There wasa stable on that underground level for the beasts, and Zamacona would presently be shewn howto find the nearest runway to the street. Before his inspection was finished, the permanentstaff of slaves arrived and were introduced; and shortly afterward there came some half-dozenfreemen and noblewomen of his future affection-group, who were to be his companions for severaldays, contributing what they could to his instruction and amusem*nt. Upon their departure, anotherparty would take their place, and so onward in rotation through a group of about fifty members.

VI.

Thus was Pánfilo de Zamacona y Nuñez absorbed for four yearsinto the life of the sinister city of Tsath in the blue-litten nether world of K’n-yan.All that he learned and saw and did is clearly not told in his manuscript; for a pious reticenceovercame him when he began to write in his native Spanish tongue, and he dared not set downeverything. Much he consistently viewed with repulsion, and many things he steadfastly refrainedfrom seeing or doing or eating. For other things he atoned by frequent countings of the beadsof his rosary. He explored the entire world of K’n-yan, including the deserted machine-citiesof the middle period on the gorse-grown plain of Nith, and made one descent into the red-littenworld of Yoth to see the Cyclopean ruins. He witnessed prodigies of craft and machinery whichleft him breathless, and beheld human metamorphoses, dematerialisations, rematerialisations,and reanimations which made him cross himself again and again. His very capacity for astonishmentwas blunted by the plethora of new marvels which every day brought him.

But the longer he stayed, the more he wished to leave, for the inner life ofK’n-yan was based on impulses very plainly outside his radius. As he progressed in historicalknowledge, he understood more; but understanding only heightened his distaste. He felt thatthe people of Tsath were a lost and dangerous race—more dangerous to themselves than theyknew—and that their growing frenzy of monotony-warfare and novelty-quest was leading themrapidly toward a precipice of disintegration and utter horror. His own visit, he could see,had accelerated their unrest; not only by introducing fears of outside invasion, but by excitingin many a wish to sally forth and taste the diverse external world he described. As time progressed,he noticed an increasing tendency of the people to resort to dematerialisation as an amusem*nt;so that the apartments and amphitheatres of Tsath became a veritable Witches’ Sabbathof transmutations, age-adjustments, death-experiments, and projections. With the growth of boredomand restlessness, he saw, cruelty and subtlety and revolt were growing apace. There was moreand more cosmic abnormality, more and more curious sadism, more and more ignorance and superstition,and more and more desire to escape out of physical life into a half-spectral state of electronicdispersal.

All his efforts to leave, however, came to nothing. Persuasion was useless,as repeated trials proved; though the mature disillusion of the upper classes at first preventedthem from resenting their guest’s open wish for departure. In a year which he reckonedas 1543 Zamacona made an actual attempt to escape through the tunnel by which he had enteredK’n-yan, but after a weary journey across the deserted plain he encountered forces inthe dark passage which discouraged him from future attempts in that direction. As a means ofsustaining hope and keeping the image of home in mind, he began about this time to make roughdraughts of the manuscript relating his adventures; delighting in the loved, old Spanish wordsand the familiar letters of the Roman alphabet. Somehow he fancied he might get the manuscriptto the outer world; and to make it convincing to his fellows he resolved to enclose it in oneof the Tulu-metal cylinders used for sacred archives. That alien, magnetic substance could notbut support the incredible story he had to tell.

But even as he planned, he had little real hope of ever establishing contactwith the earth’s surface. Every known gate, he knew, was guarded by persons or forcesthat it were better not to oppose. His attempt at escape had not helped matters, for he couldnow see a growing hostility to the outer world he represented. He hoped that no other Europeanwould find his way in; for it was possible that later comers might not fare as well as he. Hehimself had been a cherished fountain of data, and as such had enjoyed a privileged status.Others, deemed less necessary, might receive rather different treatment. He even wondered whatwould happen to him when the sages of Tsath considered him drained dry of fresh facts; and inself-defence began to be more gradual in his talks on earth-lore, conveying whenever he couldthe impression of vast knowledge held in reserve.

One other thing which endangered Zamacona’s status in Tsath was his persistentcuriosity regarding the ultimate abyss of N’kai, beneath red-litten Yoth, whose existencethe dominant religious cults of K’n-yan were more and more inclined to deny. When exploringYoth he had vainly tried to find the blocked-up entrance; and later on he experimented in thearts of dematerialisation and projection, hoping that he might thereby be able to throw hisconsciousness downward into the gulfs which his physical eyes could not discover. Though neverbecoming truly proficient in these processes, he did manage to achieve a series of monstrousand portentous dreams which he believed included some elements of actual projection into N’kai;dreams which greatly shocked and perturbed the leaders of Yig and Tulu-worship when he relatedthem, and which he was advised by friends to conceal rather than exploit. In time those dreamsbecame very frequent and maddening; containing things which he dared not record in his mainmanuscript, but of which he prepared a special record for the benefit of certain learned menin Tsath.

It may have been unfortunate—or it may have been mercifully fortunate—thatZamacona practiced so many reticences and reserved so many themes and descriptions for subsidiarymanuscripts. The main document leaves one to guess much about the detailed manners, customs,thoughts, language, and history of K’n-yan, as well as to form any adequate picture ofthe visual aspect and daily life of Tsath. One is left puzzled, too, about the real motivationsof the people; their strange passivity and craven unwarlikeness, and their almost cringing fearof the outer world despite their possession of atomic and dematerialising powers which wouldhave made them unconquerable had they taken the trouble to organise armies as in the old days.It is evident that K’n-yan was far along in its decadence—reacting with mixed apathyand hysteria against the standardised and time-tabled life of stultifying regularity which machineryhad brought it during its middle period. Even the grotesque and repulsive customs and modesof thought and feeling can be traced to this source; for in his historical research Zamaconafound evidence of bygone eras in which K’n-yan had held ideas much like those of the classicand renaissance outer world, and had possessed a national character and art full of what Europeansregard as dignity, kindness, and nobility.

The more Zamacona studied these things, the more apprehensive about the futurehe became; because he saw that the omnipresent moral and intellectual disintegration was a tremendouslydeep-seated and ominously accelerating movement. Even during his stay the signs of decay multiplied.Rationalism degenerated more and more into fanatical and orgiastic superstition, centring ina lavish adoration of the magnetic Tulu-metal, and tolerance steadily dissolved into a seriesof frenzied hatreds, especially toward the outer world of which the scholars were learning somuch from him. At times he almost feared that the people might some day lose their age-longapathy and brokenness and turn like desperate rats against the unknown lands above them, sweepingall before them by virtue of their singular and still-remembered scientific powers. But forthe present they fought their boredom and sense of emptiness in other ways; multiplying theirhideous emotional outlets and increasing the mad grotesqueness and abnormality of their diversions.The arenas of Tsath must have been accursed and unthinkable places—Zamacona never went nearthem. And what they would be in another century, or even in another decade, he did not dareto think. The pious Spaniard crossed himself and counted his beads more often than usual inthose days.

In the year 1545, as he reckoned it, Zamacona began what may well be acceptedas his final series of attempts to leave K’n-yan. His fresh opportunity came from an unexpectedsource—a female of his affection-group who conceived for him a curious individual infatuationbased on some hereditary memory of the days of monogamous wedlock in Tsath. Over this female—anoblewoman of moderate beauty and of at least average intelligence named T’la-yub—Zamaconaacquired the most extraordinary influence; finally inducing her to help him in an escape, underthe promise that he would let her accompany him. Chance proved a great factor in the courseof events, for T’la-yub came of a primordial family of gate-lords who had retained oraltraditions of at least one passage to the outer world which the mass of people had forgotteneven at the time of the great closing; a passage to a mound on the level plains of earth whichhad, in consequence, never been sealed up or guarded. She explained that the primordial gate-lordswere not guards or sentries, but merely ceremonial and economic proprietors, half-feudal andbaronial in status, of an era preceding the severance of surface-relations. Her own family hadbeen so reduced at the time of the closing that their gate had been wholly overlooked; and theyhad ever afterward preserved the secret of its existence as a sort of hereditary secret—asource of pride, and of a sense of reserve power, to offset the feeling of vanished wealth andinfluence which so constantly irritated them.

Zamacona, now working feverishly to get his manuscript into final form in caseanything should happen to him, decided to take with him on his outward journey only five beast-loadsof unalloyed gold in the form of the small ingots used for minor decorations—enough, he calculated,to make him a personage of unlimited power in his own world. He had become somewhat hardenedto the sight of the monstrous gyaa-yothn during his four years of residence in Tsath,hence did not shrink from using the creatures; yet he resolved to kill and bury them, and cachethe gold, as soon as he reached the outer world, since he knew that even a glimpse of one ofthe things would drive any ordinary Indian mad. Later he could arrange for a suitable expeditionto transport the treasure to Mexico. T’la-yub he would perhaps allow to share his fortunes,for she was by no means unattractive; though possibly he would arrange for her sojourn amongstthe plains Indians, since he was not overanxious to preserve links with the manner of life inTsath. For a wife, of course, he would choose a lady of Spain—or at worst, an Indian princessof normal outer-world descent and a regular and approved past. But for the present T’la-yubmust be used as a guide. The manuscript he would carry on his own person, encased in a book-cylinderof the sacred and magnetic Tulu-metal.

The expedition itself is described in the addendum to Zamacona’s manuscript,written later, and in a hand shewing signs of nervous strain. It set out amidst the most carefulprecautions, choosing a rest-period and proceeding as far as possible along the faintly lightedpassages beneath the city. Zamacona and T’la-yub, disguised in slaves’ garments,bearing provision-knapsacks, and leading the five laden beasts on foot, were readily taken forcommonplace workers; and they clung as long as possible to the subterranean way—usinga long and little-frequented branch which had formerly conducted the mechanical transports tothe now ruined suburb of L’thaa. Amidst the ruins of L’thaa they came to the surface,thereafter passing as rapidly as possible over the deserted, blue-litten plain of Nith towardthe Grh-yan range of low hills. There, amidst the tangled underbrush, T’la-yub found thelong disused and half-fabulous entrance to the forgotten tunnel; a thing she had seen but oncebefore—aeons in the past, when her father had taken her thither to shew her this monument totheir family pride. It was hard work getting the laden gyaa-yothn to scrape through theobstructing vines and briers, and one of them displayed a rebelliousness destined to bear direconsequences—bolting away from the party and loping back toward Tsath on its detestable pads,golden burden and all.

It was nightmare work burrowing by the light of blue-ray torches upward, downward,forward, and upward again through a dank, choked tunnel that no foot had trodden since agesbefore the sinking of Atlantis; and at one point T’la-yub had to practice the fearsomeart of dematerialisation on herself, Zamacona, and the laden beasts in order to pass a pointwholly clogged by shifting earth-strata. It was a terrible experience for Zamacona; for althoughhe had often witnessed dematerialisation in others, and even practiced it himself to the extentof dream-projection, he had never been fully subjected to it before. But T’la-yub wasskilled in the arts of K’n-yan, and accomplished the double metamorphosis in perfect safety.

Thereafter they resumed the hideous burrowing through stalactited crypts ofhorror where monstrous carvings leered at every turn; alternately camping and advancing fora period which Zamacona reckoned as about three days, but which was probably less. At last theycame to a very narrow place where the natural or only slightly hewn cave-walls gave place towalls of wholly artificial masonry, carved into terrible bas-reliefs. These walls, after abouta mile of steep ascent, ended with a pair of vast niches, one on each side, in which monstrous,nitre-encrusted images of Yig and Tulu squatted, glaring at each other across the passage asthey had glared since the earliest youth of the human world. At this point the passage openedinto a prodigious vaulted and circular chamber of human construction; wholly covered with horriblecarvings, and revealing at the farther end an arched passageway with the foot of a flight ofsteps. T’la-yub knew from family tales that this must be very near the earth’s surface,but she could not tell just how near. Here the party camped for what they meant to be theirlast rest-period in the subterraneous world.

It must have been hours later that the clank of metal and the padding of beasts’feet awakened Zamacona and T’la-yub. A bluish glare was spreading from the narrow passagebetween the images of Yig and Tulu, and in an instant the truth was obvious. An alarm had beengiven at Tsath—as was later revealed, by the returning gyaa-yoth which had rebelled at the brier-chokedtunnel-entrance—and a swift party of pursuers had come to arrest the fugitives. Resistancewas clearly useless, and none was offered. The party of twelve beast-riders proved studiouslypolite, and the return commenced almost without a word or thought-message on either side.

It was an ominous and depressing journey, and the ordeal of dematerialisationand rematerialisation at the choked place was all the more terrible because of the lack of thathope and expectancy which had palliated the process on the outward trip. Zamacona heard hiscaptors discussing the imminent clearing of this choked place by intensive radiations, sincehenceforward sentries must be maintained at the hitherto unknown outer portal. It would notdo to let outsiders get within the passage, for then any who might escape without due treatmentwould have a hint of the vastness of the inner world and would perhaps be curious enough toreturn in greater strength. As with the other passages since Zamacona’s coming, sentriesmust be stationed all along, as far as the very outermost gate; sentries drawn from amongstall the slaves, the dead-alive y’m-bhi, or the class of discredited freemen. Withthe overrunning of the American plains by thousands of Europeans, as the Spaniard had predicted,every passage was a potential source of danger; and must be rigorously guarded until the technologistsof Tsath could spare the energy to prepare an ultimate and entrance-hiding obliteration as theyhad done for many passages in earlier and more vigorous times.

Zamacona and T’la-yub were tried before three gn’agn ofthe supreme tribunal in the gold-and-copper palace behind the gardened and fountained park,and the Spaniard was given his liberty because of the vital outer-world information he stillhad to impart. He was told to return to his apartment and to his affection-group; taking uphis life as before, and continuing to meet deputations of scholars according to the latest schedulehe had been following. No restrictions would be imposed upon him so long as he might remainpeacefully in K’n-yan—but it was intimated that such leniency would not be repeatedafter another attempt at escape. Zamacona had felt that there was an element of irony in theparting words of the chief gn’ag—an assurance that all of his gyaa-yothn,including the one which had rebelled, would be returned to him.

The fate of T’la-yub was less happy. There being no object in retainingher, and her ancient Tsathic lineage giving her act a greater aspect of treason than Zamacona’shad possessed, she was ordered to be delivered to the curious diversions of the amphitheatre;and afterward, in a somewhat mutilated and half-dematerialised form, to be given the functionsof a y’m-bhi or animated corpse-slave and stationed among the sentries guardingthe passage whose existence she had betrayed. Zamacona soon heard, not without many pangs ofregret he could scarcely have anticipated, that poor T’la-yub had emerged from the arenain a headless and otherwise incomplete state, and had been set as an outermost guard upon themound in which the passage had been found to terminate. She was, he was told, a night-sentinel,whose automatic duty was to warn off all comers with a torch; sending down reports to a smallgarrison of twelve dead slave y’m-bhi and six living but partly dematerialisedfreemen in the vaulted, circular chamber if the approachers did not heed her warning. She worked,he was told, in conjunction with a day-sentinel—a living freeman who chose this post inpreference to other forms of discipline for other offences against the state. Zamacona, of course,had long known that most of the chief gate-sentries were such discredited freemen.

It was now made plain to him, though indirectly, that his own penalty for anotherescape-attempt would be service as a gate-sentry—but in the form of a dead-alive y’m-bhislave, and after amphitheatre-treatment even more picturesque than that which T’la-yubwas reported to have undergone. It was intimated that he—or parts of him—wouldbe reanimated to guard some inner section of the passage; within sight of others, where hisabridged person might serve as a permanent symbol of the rewards of treason. But, his informantsalways added, it was of course inconceivable that he would ever court such a fate. So long ashe remained peaceably in K’n-yan, he would continue to be a free, privileged, and respectedpersonage.

Yet in the end Pánfilo de Zamacona did court the fate so direfully hintedto him. True, he did not really expect to encounter it; but the nervous latter part of his manuscriptmakes it clear that he was prepared to face its possibility. What gave him a final hope of scathelessescape from K’n-yan was his growing mastery of the art of dematerialisation. Having studiedit for years, and having learned still more from the two instances in which he had been subjectedto it, he now felt increasingly able to use it independently and effectively. The manuscriptrecords several notable experiments in this art—minor successes accomplished in his apartment—andreflects Zamacona’s hope that he might soon be able to assume the spectral form in full,attaining complete invisibility and preserving that condition as long as he wished.

Once he reached this stage, he argued, the outward way lay open to him. Ofcourse he could not bear away any gold, but mere escape was enough. He would, though, dematerialiseand carry away with him his manuscript in the Tulu-metal cylinder, even though it cost additionaleffort; for this record and proof must reach the outer world at all hazards. He now knew thepassage to follow; and if he could thread it in an atom-scattered state, he did not see howany person or force could detect or stop him. The only trouble would be if he failed to maintainhis spectral condition at all times. That was the one ever-present peril, as he had learnedfrom his experiments. But must one not always risk death and worse in a life of adventure? Zamaconawas a gentleman of Old Spain; of the blood that faced the unknown and carved out half the civilisationof the New World.

For many nights after his ultimate resolution Zamacona prayed to St. Pamphilusand other guardian saints, and counted the beads of his rosary. The last entry in the manuscript,which toward the end took the form of a diary more and more, was merely a single sentence— “Esmás tarde de lo que pensaba—tengo que marcharme” . . . .“It is later than I thought; I must go.” After that, only silence and conjecture—andsuch evidence as the presence of the manuscript itself, and what that manuscript could leadto, might provide.

VII.

When I looked up from my half-stupefied reading and note-taking the morningsun was high in the heavens. The electric bulb was still burning, but such things of the realworld—the modern outer world—were far from my whirling brain. I knew I was in myroom at Clyde Compton’s at Binger—but upon what monstrous vista had I stumbled?Was this thing a hoax or a chronicle of madness? If a hoax, was it a jest of the sixteenth centuryor of today? The manuscript’s age looked appallingly genuine to my not wholly unpracticedeyes, and the problem presented by the strange metal cylinder I dared not even think about.

Moreover, what a monstrously exact explanation it gave of all the bafflingphenomena of the mound—of the seemingly meaningless and paradoxical actions of diurnaland nocturnal ghosts, and of the queer cases of madness and disappearance! It was even an accursedlyplausible explanation—evilly consistent—if one could adopt the incredible.It must be a shocking hoax devised by someone who knew all the lore of the mound. There waseven a hint of social satire in the account of that unbelievable nether world of horror anddecay. Surely this was the clever forgery of some learned cynic—something like the leadencrosses in New Mexico, which a jester once planted and pretended to discover as a relique ofsome forgotten Dark Age colony from Europe.

Upon going down to breakfast I hardly knew what to tell Compton and his mother,as well as the curious callers who had already begun to arrive. Still in a daze, I cut the GordianKnot by giving a few points from the notes I had made, and mumbling my belief that the thingwas a subtle and ingenious fraud left there by some previous explorer of the mound—a beliefin which everybody seemed to concur when told of the substance of the manuscript. It is curioushow all that breakfast group—and all the others in Binger to whom the discussion was repeated—seemedto find a great clearing of the atmosphere in the notion that somebody was playing a joke onsomebody. For the time we all forgot that the known, recent history of the mound presented mysteriesas strange as any in the manuscript, and as far from acceptable solution as ever.

The fears and doubts began to return when I asked for volunteers to visit themound with me. I wanted a larger excavating party—but the idea of going to that uncomfortableplace seemed no more attractive to the people of Binger than it had seemed on the previous day.I myself felt a mounting horror upon looking toward the mound and glimpsing the moving speckwhich I knew was the daylight sentinel; for in spite of all my scepticism the morbidities ofthat manuscript stuck by me and gave everything connected with the place a new and monstroussignificance. I absolutely lacked the resolution to look at the moving speck with my binoculars.Instead, I set out with the kind of bravado we display in nightmares—when, knowing weare dreaming, we plunge desperately into still thicker horrors, for the sake of having the wholething over the sooner. My pick and shovel were already out there, so I had only my handbag ofsmaller paraphernalia to take. Into this I put the strange cylinder and its contents, feelingvaguely that I might possibly find something worth checking up with some part of the green-letteredSpanish text. Even a clever hoax might be founded on some actual attribute of the mound whicha former explorer had discovered—and that magnetic metal was damnably odd! Grey Eagle’scryptic talisman still hung from its leathern cord around my neck.

I did not look very sharply at the mound as I walked toward it, but when Ireached it there was nobody in sight. Repeating my upward scramble of the previous day, I wastroubled by thoughts of what might lie close at hand if, by any miracle, any partof the manuscript were actually half-true. In such a case, I could not help reflecting,the hypothetical Spaniard Zamacona must have barely reached the outer world when overtaken bysome disaster—perhaps an involuntary rematerialisation. He would naturally, in that event,have been seized by whichever sentry happened to be on duty at the time—either the discreditedfreeman, or, as a matter of supreme irony, the very T’la-yub who had planned and aidedhis first attempt at escape—and in the ensuing struggle the cylinder with the manuscriptmight well have been dropped on the mound’s summit, to be neglected and gradually buriedfor nearly four centuries. But, I added, as I climbed over the crest, one must not think ofextravagant things like that. Still, if there were anything in the tale, it must havebeen a monstrous fate to which Zamacona had been dragged back . . . the amphitheatre . . .mutilation . . . duty somewhere in the dank, nitrous tunnel as a dead-alive slave . . .a maimed corpse-fragment as an automatic interior sentry. . . .

It was a very real shock which chased this morbid speculation from my head,for upon glancing around the elliptical summit I saw at once that my pick and shovel had beenstolen. This was a highly provoking and disconcerting development; baffling, too, in view ofthe seeming reluctance of all the Binger folk to visit the mound. Was this reluctance a pretendedthing, and had the jokers of the village been chuckling over my coming discomfiture as theysolemnly saw me off ten minutes before? I took out my binoculars and scanned the gaping crowdat the edge of the village. No—they did not seem to be looking for any comic climax; yetwas not the whole affair at bottom a colossal joke in which all the villagers and reservationpeople were concerned—legends, manuscript, cylinder, and all? I thought of how I had seenthe sentry from a distance, and then found him unaccountably vanished; thought also of the conductof old Grey Eagle, of the speech and expressions of Compton and his mother, and of the unmistakablefright of most of the Binger people. On the whole, it could not very well be a village-widejoke. The fear and the problem were surely real, though obviously there were one or two jestingdaredevils in Binger who had stolen out to the mound and made off with the tools I had left.

Everything else on the mound was as I had left it—brush cut by my machete,slight, bowl-like depression toward the north end, and the hole I had made with my trench-knifein digging up the magnetism-revealed cylinder. Deeming it too great a concession to the unknownjokers to return to Binger for another pick and shovel, I resolved to carry out my programmeas best I could with the machete and trench-knife in my handbag; so extracting these, I setto work excavating the bowl-like depression which my eye had picked as the possible site ofa former entrance to the mound. As I proceeded, I felt again the suggestion of a sudden windblowing against me which I had noticed the day before—a suggestion which seemed stronger,and still more reminiscent of unseen, formless, opposing hands laid on my wrists, as I cut deeperand deeper through the root-tangled red soil and reached the exotic black loam beneath. Thetalisman around my neck appeared to twitch oddly in the breeze—not in any one direction,as when attracted by the buried cylinder, but vaguely and diffusely, in a manner wholly unaccountable.

Then, quite without warning, the black, root-woven earth beneath my feet beganto sink cracklingly, while I heard a faint sound of sifting, falling matter far below me. Theobstructing wind, or forces, or hands now seemed to be operating from the very seat of the sinking,and I felt that they aided me by pushing as I leaped back out of the hole to avoid being involvedin any cave-in. Bending down over the brink and hacking at the mould-caked root-tangle withmy machete, I felt that they were against me again—but at no time were they strong enoughto stop my work. The more roots I severed, the more falling matter I heard below. Finally thehole began to deepen of itself toward the centre, and I saw that the earth was sifting downinto some large cavity beneath, so as to leave a good-sized aperture when the roots that hadbound it were gone. A few more hacks of the machete did the trick, and with a parting cave-inand uprush of curiously chill and alien air the last barrier gave way. Under the morning sunyawned a huge opening at least three feet square, and shewing the top of a flight of stone stepsdown which the loose earth of the collapse was still sliding. My quest had come to somethingat last! With an elation of accomplishment almost overbalancing fear for the nonce, I replacedthe trench-knife and machete in my handbag, took out my powerful electric torch, and preparedfor a triumphant, lone, and utterly rash invasion of the fabulous nether world I had uncovered.

It was rather hard getting down the first few steps, both because of the fallenearth which had choked them and because of a sinister up-pushing of a cold wind from below.The talisman around my neck swayed curiously, and I began to regret the disappearing squareof daylight above me. The electric torch shewed dank, water-stained, and salt-encrusted wallsfashioned of huge basalt blocks, and now and then I thought I descried some trace of carvingbeneath the nitrous deposits. I gripped my handbag more tightly, and was glad of the comfortingweight of the sheriff’s heavy revolver in my right-hand coat pocket. After a time thepassage began to wind this way and that, and the staircase became free from obstructions. Carvingson the walls were now definitely traceable, and I shuddered when I saw how clearly the grotesquefigures resembled the monstrous bas-reliefs on the cylinder I had found. Winds and forces continuedto blow malevolently against me, and at one or two bends I half fancied the torch gave glimpsesof thin, transparent shapes not unlike the sentinel on the mound as my binoculars had shewedhim. When I reached this stage of visual chaos I stopped for a moment to get a grip on myself.It would not do to let my nerves get the better of me at the very outset of what would surelybe a trying experience, and the most important archaeological feat of my career.

But I wished I had not stopped at just that place, for the act fixed my attentionon something profoundly disturbing. It was only a small object lying close to the wall on oneof the steps below me, but that object was such as to put my reason to a severe test, and bringup a line of the most alarming speculations. That the opening above me had been closed againstall material forms for generations was utterly obvious from the growth of shrub-roots and accumulationof drifting soil; yet the object before me was most distinctly not many generations old. Forit was an electric torch much like the one I now carried—warped and encrusted in the tomb-likedampness, but none the less perfectly unmistakable. I descended a few steps and picked it up,wiping off the evil deposits on my rough coat. One of the nickel bands bore an engraved nameand address, and I recognised it with a start the moment I made it out. It reads.“C. Williams, 17 Trowbridge St., Cambridge, Mass.” —and I knew that it had belongedto one of the two daring college instructors who had disappeared on June 28, 1915. Only thirteenyears ago, and yet I had just broken through the sod of centuries! How had the thing got there?Another entrance—or was there something after all in this mad idea of dematerialisationand rematerialisation?

Doubt and horror grew upon me as I wound still farther down the seemingly endlessstaircase. Would the thing never stop? The carvings grew more and more distinct, and assumeda narrative pictorial quality which brought me close to panic as I recognised many unmistakablecorrespondences with the history of K’n-yan as sketched in the manuscript now restingin my handbag. For the first time I began seriously to question the wisdom of my descent, andto wonder whether I had not better return to the upper air before I came uponsomething which would never let me return as a sane man. But I did not hesitate long, for asa Virginian I felt the blood of ancestral fighters and gentlemen-adventurers pounding a protestagainst retreat from any peril known or unknown.

My descent became swifter rather than slower, and I avoided studying the terriblebas-reliefs and intaglios that had unnerved me. All at once I saw an arched opening ahead, andrealised that the prodigious staircase had ended at last. But with that realisation came horrorin mounting magnitude, for before me there yawned a vast vaulted crypt of all-too-familiar outline—agreat circular space answering in every least particular to the carving-lined chamber describedin the Zamacona manuscript.

It was indeed the place. There could be no mistake. And if any room for doubtyet remained, that room was abolished by what I saw directly across the great vault. It wasa second arched opening, commencing a long, narrow passage and having at its mouth two hugeopposite niches bearing loathsome and titanic images of shockingly familiar pattern. There inthe dark unclean Yig and hideous Tulu squatted eternally, glaring at each other across the passageas they had glared since the earliest youth of the human world.

From this point onward I ask no credence for what I tell—for what Ithink I saw. It is too utterly unnatural, too utterly monstrous and incredible, to be anypart of sane human experience or objective reality. My torch, though casting a powerful beamahead, naturally could not furnish any general illumination of the Cyclopean crypt; so I nowbegan moving it about to explore the giant walls little by little. As I did so, I saw to myhorror that the space was by no means vacant, but was instead littered with odd furniture andutensils and heaps of packages which bespoke a populous recent occupancy—no nitrous reliquesof the past, but queerly shaped objects and supplies in modern, every-day use. As my torch restedon each article or group of articles, however, the distinctness of the outlines soon began togrow blurred; until in the end I could scarcely tell whether the things belonged to the realmof matter or to the realm of spirit.

All this while the adverse winds blew against me with increasing fury, andthe unseen hands plucked malevolently at me and snatched at the strange magnetic talisman Iwore. Wild conceits surged through my mind. I thought of the manuscript and what it said aboutthe garrison stationed in this place—twelve dead slave y’m-bhi and six livingbut partly dematerialised freemen—that was in 1545—three hundred and eighty-three yearsago. . . . What since then? Zamacona had predicted change . . . subtle disintegration . . .more dematerialisation . . . weaker and weaker . . . was it Grey Eagle’stalisman that held them at bay—their sacred Tulu-metal—and were they feebly trying topluck it off so that they might do to me what they had done to those who had come before? . . .It occurred to me with shuddering force that I was building my speculations out of a full beliefin the Zamacona manuscript—this must not be—I must get a grip on myself—

But, curse it, every time I tried to get a grip I saw some fresh sight to shattermy poise still further. This time, just as my will power was driving the half-seen paraphernaliainto obscurity, my glance and torch-beam had to light on two things of very different nature;two things of the eminently real and sane world; yet they did more to unseat my shaky reasonthan anything I had seen before—because I knew what they were, and knew how profoundly,in the course of Nature, they ought not to be there. They were my own missing pick and shovel,side by side, and leaning neatly against the blasphemously carved wall of that hellish crypt.God in heaven—and I had babbled to myself about daring jokers from Binger!

That was the last straw. After that the cursed hypnotism of the manuscriptgot at me, and I actually saw the half-transparent shapes of the things that were pushingand plucking; pushing and plucking—those leprous palaeogean things with something of humanitystill clinging to them—the complete forms, and the forms that were morbidly andperversely incomplete . . . all these, and hideous other entities—thefour-footed blasphemies with ape-like face and projecting horn . . . and nota sound so far in all that nitrous hell of inner earth. . . .

Then there was a sound—a flopping; a padding; a dull, advancingsound which heralded beyond question a being as structurally material as the pickaxe and theshovel—something wholly unlike the shadow-shapes that ringed me in, yet equally remotefrom any sort of life as life is understood on the earth’s wholesome surface. My shatteredbrain tried to prepare me for what was coming, but could not frame any adequate image. I couldonly say over and over again to myself, “It is of the abyss, but it is not dematerialised.”The padding grew more distinct, and from the mechanical cast of the tread I knew it was a deadthing that stalked in the darkness. Then—oh, God, I saw it in the full beam of my torch;saw it framed like a sentinel in the narrow passage between the nightmare idols of the serpentYig and the octopus Tulu. . . .

Let me collect myself enough to hint at what I saw; to explain why I droppedtorch and handbag and fled empty-handed in the utter blackness, wrapped in a merciful unconsciousnesswhich did not wear off until the sun and the distant yelling and the shouting from the villageroused me as I lay gasping on the top of the accursed mound. I do not yet know what guided meagain to the earth’s surface. I only know that the watchers in Binger saw me stagger upinto sight three hours after I had vanished; saw me lurch up and fall flat on the ground asif struck by a bullet. None of them dared to come out and help me; but they knew I must be ina bad state, so tried to rouse me as best they could by yelling in chorus and firing off revolvers.

It worked in the end, and when I came to I almost rolled down the side of themound in my eagerness to get away from that black aperture which still yawned open. My torchand tools, and the handbag with the manuscript, were all down there; but it is easy to see whyneither I nor anyone else ever went after them. When I staggered across the plain and into thevillage I dared not tell what I had seen. I only muttered vague things about carvings and statuesand snakes and shaken nerves. And I did not faint again until somebody mentioned that the ghost-sentinelhad reappeared about the time I had staggered half way back to town. I left Binger that evening,and have never been there since, though they tell me the ghosts still appear on the mound asusual.

But I have resolved to hint here at last what I dared not hint to the peopleof Binger on that terrible August afternoon. I don’t know yet just how I can go aboutit—and if in the end you think my reticence strange, just remember that to imagine sucha horror is one thing, but to see it is another thing. I saw it. I think you’llrecall my citing early in this tale the case of a bright young man named Heaton who went outto that mound one day in 1891 and came back at night as the village idiot, babbling for eightyears about horrors and then dying in an epileptic fit. What he used to keep moaning was “Thatwhite man—oh, my God, what they did to him. . . .”

Well, I saw the same thing that poor Heaton saw—and I saw it after readingthe manuscript, so I know more of its history than he did. That makes it worse—for I knowall that it implies; all that must be still brooding and festering and waiting down there.I told you it had padded mechanically toward me out of the narrow passage and had stood sentry-likeat the entrance between the frightful eidola of Yig and Tulu. That was very natural and inevitable—becausethe thing was a sentry. It had been made a sentry for punishment, and it was quite dead—besideslacking head, arms, lower legs, and other customary parts of a human being. Yes—it hadbeen a very human being once; and what is more, it had been white. Very obviously, ifthat manuscript was as true as I think it was, this being had been used for the diversionsof the amphitheatre before its life had become wholly extinct and supplanted by automaticimpulses controlled from outside.

On its white and only slightly hairy chest some letters had been gashed orbranded—I had not stopped to investigate, but had merely noted that they were in an awkwardand fumbling Spanish; an awkward Spanish implying a kind of ironic use of the language by analien inscriber familiar neither with the idiom nor the Roman letters used to record it. Theinscription had read “Secuestrado a la voluntad de Xinaián en el cuerpo decapitadode Tlayúb”–“Seized by the will of K’n-yan in the headless bodyof T’la-yub.”

I.

After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of themythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that whichI think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17-18, 1935. There is reasonto hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundantcauses existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. Ifthe thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of hisown 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 wholerace, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. Itis for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, a final abandonment ofall attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expeditionset out to investigate.

Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such ashas befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought todismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesomeobject which would—if real and brought out of that noxious abyss—have formed irrefutableevidence. When I came upon the horror I was alone—and I have up to now told no one aboutit. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sandhave so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definitive statement—notonly 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 readersof the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringingme home. I shall give them to my son, Prof. Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University—theonly member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man bestinformed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridiculewhat I shall tell of that fateful night. I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, becauseI think he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisurewill leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey.He can do as he thinks best with this account—shewing it, with suitable comment, to anyquarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as areunfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself witha fairly ample summary of its background.

My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper talesof a generation back—or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or sevenyears ago—will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strangeamnesia in 1908-13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraftwhich lurk 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 heredityand early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenlyupon me from outside sources. It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given tocrumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—thougheven this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. Butthe chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, camefrom 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 oldHaverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the old homestead in Boardman Streetnear Golden Hill—and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at theage of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and cameback to Miskatonic as Instructor of Political Economy in 1895. For thirteen years more my liferan smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children,Robert K., Wingate, and Hannah, were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I becamean associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest ineither occultism or abnormal psychology.

It was on Thursday, May 14, 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing wasquite sudden, though later I realised that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hoursprevious—chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented—musthave formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogethernew to me—that someone else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.

The collapse occurred about 10:20 a.m., while I was conducting a class in PoliticalEconomy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for juniors and a few sophom*ores.I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room otherthan the classroom. My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw thatsomething was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious in my chair, in a stupor fromwhich no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylightof our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.

It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I shewed nosign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though removed to my home at 27 Crane St.and given the best of medical attention. At 3 a.m. May 15 my eyes opened and I began to speak,but before long the doctors and my family were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expressionand language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity or of my past, though forsome reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed strangely at thepersons around me, and the flexions of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.

Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsilyand gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learnedthe English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemedto 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 theyoungest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase beganto have an actual currency—first in England and then in the United States—and thoughof much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifyingwords of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.

Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-educationin the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other handicapsinherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care. When I sawthat my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and became eager forinformation of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I had lost interest in my properpersonality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing. They noticedthat my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art, language, andfolklore—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 almostunknown 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 therange of accepted history—passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprisethey created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three times caused actualfright. These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their vanishmentmore to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange knowledge behindthem. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of theage 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 shortlybegan 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 alack 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 seemedto puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptom or some queer trace of carefullyveiled mockery.

Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspectand speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in everyone I met, as if I were a beinginfinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden horrorconnected 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 regardedme with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body ofher husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me evenafter my return to normalcy in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son and my smalldaughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.

Only my second son Wingate seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsionwhich my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years oldheld 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 whichI was driven, and today at thirty-five he is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic. But Ido not wonder at the horror I caused—for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial expressionof the being that awaked on May 15, 1908 were not those of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.

I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readersmay glean all the outward essentials—as I largely had to do—from files of old newspapersand scientific journals. I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the wholewisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singularin the extreme; involving long visits to remote and desolate places. In 1909 I spent a monthin the Himalayas, and in 1911 aroused much attention through a camel trip into the unknown desertsof Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have never been able to learn. During the summerof 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic north of Spitzbergen, afterward shewingsigns of disappointment. Later in that year I spent weeks alone beyond the limits of previousor subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia—blacklabyrinths 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 detailof a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpretingcomplex figures in an instant was veritably awesome. At times there appeared almost ugly reportsof my power to influence the thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken careto minimise displays of this faculty.

Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups,and scholars suspected of connexion with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants.These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known tenorof some of my reading—for the consultation of rare books at libraries cannot be effectedsecretly. There is tangible proof—in the form of marginal notes—that I went minutelythrough such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’sDe Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the survivingfragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the madArab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cultactivity 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 returningmemories of my earlier life—though most auditors judged me insincere, since all the recollectionsI gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from my old private papers. About themiddle of August I returned to Arkham and reopened my long-closed house in Crane St. Here Iinstalled a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makersof scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of anyoneintelligent enough to analyse it. Those who did see it—a workman, a servant, and the newhousekeeper—say that it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though onlyabout two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular andconvex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be located.

On the evening of Friday, Sept. 26, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maidtill noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiouslyforeign-looking man called in an automobile. It was about 1 a.m. that the lights were last seen.At 2:15 a.m. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but with the stranger’s motorstill at the curb. By four o’clock the motor was certainly gone. It was at six that ahesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr. Wilson to call at my house and bring me outof a peculiar faint. This call—a long-distance one—was later traced to a publicbooth 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—inan easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished table-top were scratches shewingwhere some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heardof it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away. In the library grate were abundantashes evidently left from the burning of every remaining scrap of paper on which I had writtensince the advent of the amnesia. Dr. Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after an hypodermicinjection it became more regular.

At 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto mask-like facebegan to shew signs of expression. Dr. Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of mysecondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11:30 I muttered somevery curious syllables—syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared,too, to struggle against something. Then, just after noon—the housekeeper and the maidhaving meanwhile returned—I began to mutter in English.

“. . . of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifiesthe prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycleof prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apexof . . .”

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time-scaleit was still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battereddesk on the platform.

II.

My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over fiveyears creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were countless mattersto be adjusted. What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I triedto view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last regaining custody of my second sonWingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume teaching—myold professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.

I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. Bythat time I realised how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane—I hoped—andwith no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vaguedreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the world war turnedmy 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—seemedsubtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’smind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.

The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-offconsequences —as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back uponit 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 diffidentlyhinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses. Some persons looked uncomfortablyat me, but men in the mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories ofrelativity—then discussed only in learned circles—which were later to become sofamous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing time to the status of amere dimension.

But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop myregular work in 1915. Certain of the impressions were taking an annoying shape—givingme the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; thatthe secondary personality had indeed been an intruding force from unknown regions, and thatmy own personality had suffered displacement. Thus I was driven to vague and frightful speculationsconcerning the whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had held my body. Thecurious knowledge and strange conduct of my body’s late tenant troubled me more and moreas I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines. Queernesses that had baffledothers seemed to harmonise terribly with some background of black knowledge which festered inthe chasms of my subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of information bearingon 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—andthese seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them, I seldommentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I commenceda scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or non-typical such visions mightbe among amnesia victims. My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, andmental specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalitiesfrom the days of daemoniac-possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first botheredme more than they consoled me.

I soon found that my dreams had indeed no counterpart in the overwhelming bulkof true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years baffledand shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of ancientfolklore; others were case-histories in the annals of medicine; one or two were anecdotes obscurelyburied in standard histories. It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction wasprodigiously rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginning ofman’s annals. Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases; others none—orat least none whose record survived.

The essence was always the same—a person of keen thoughtfulness seizedwith a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existencetypified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific,historic, artistic, and anthropological knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zestand with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of the rightful consciousness,intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of somehideous memory elaborately blotted out. And the close resemblance of those nightmares to myown—even in some of the smallest particulars—left no doubt in my mind of their significantlytypical 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 housebefore the second change.

Another thing that cloudily worried me during my investigation was the somewhatgreater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was affordedto persons not visited with well-defined amnesia. These persons were largely of mediocre mindor less—some so primitive that they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles for abnormalscholarship and preternatural mental acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alienforce—then a backward lapse and a thin, swift-fading memory of un-human horrors.

There had been at least three such cases during the past half century—oneonly fifteen years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from someunsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments ofa kind and authorship utterly beyond sane belief? Such were a few of the formless speculationsof my weaker hours—fancies abetted by myths which my studies uncovered. For I could notdoubt but that certain persistent legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to thevictims and physicians connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaborationof memory lapses such as mine.

Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorousI still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savour of madness, and at times I believed I wasindeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapsesof memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank withpseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries. This, indeed (though an alternativefolklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible), was the belief of many of the alienistswho helped me in my search for parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblancessometimes discovered. They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather amongneurotic disorders. My course in trying to track it down and analyse it, instead of vainly seekingto dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychologicalprinciples. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had studied me during my possessionby the other personality.

My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstractmatters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horrorconcerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes wouldfind it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent. When I did glance down and beholdthe familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue clothing I always felt a curious relief, thoughin order to gain this relief I had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much aspossible, and was always shaved at the barber’s.

It was a long time before I correlated any of these disjointed feelings withthe fleeting visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation had to dowith the odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my memory. I felt that the snatchesof 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. Thencame that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to placethe 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-nighlost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle ofthe arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans. There were colossal roundwindows and high arched doors, and pedestals or tables each as tall as the height of an ordinaryroom. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immensesize with strange hieroglyphs on their backs. The exposed stonework held curious carvings, alwaysin curvilinear mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same charactersthat the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megalithic type, withlines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them. Therewere no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers, and whatseemed to be writing materials—oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stainedtips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above. On some ofthem were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formedof 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 topsof singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs andhangings were entirely lacking.

Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and upand 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 floatedmust have towered into the sky for thousands of feet. There were multiple levels of black vaultsbelow, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestionsof some special peril. I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everythingI saw. I felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul withtheir message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.

Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and fromthe titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapetof stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led. There were almost endless leaguesof giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feetwide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than five hundred feet square or athousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousandfeet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens. They seemed tobe mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonrynoticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended to havescalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and wide cleared spacesamidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I couldnot resolve this impression into details.

In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed farabove any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature, and shewedsigns of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basaltmasonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the leasttraces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildings—allcrumbling with the weathering of aeons—which resembled these dark cylindrical towers inbasic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicableaura of menace and concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.

The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarreand 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 toweredto fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-greenshrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognisable, bloomingin geometrical beds and at large among the greenery. In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardenswere larger and more vivid blossoms of almost offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificialbreeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patternsbespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardenson the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, buton 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 towitness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the sun—whichlooked abnormally large—and of the moon, whose markings held a touch of difference fromthe normal that I could never quite fathom. When—very rarely—the night sky was clearto any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlineswere sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groupsI could recognise, I felt I must be in the earth’s southern hemisphere, near the Tropicof Capricorn. The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great junglesof unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantasticfrondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions ofmotion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved.

By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatingsover the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forestsof fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strangeas the one which persistently haunted me. I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescentstone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causewaysover swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. Once Isaw an area of countless miles strown with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose architecture hadbeen like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the haunting city. And once I sawthe sea—a boundless steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of an enormous townof domes and arches. Great shapeless suggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and thereits surface was vexed with anomalous spoutings.

III.

As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their terrifyingquality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things—things compoundedof unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged in fantastically novelforms by the unchecked caprices of sleep. For some time I accepted the visions as natural, eventhough 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 reflecta common text-book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of ahundred and fifty million years ago—the world of the Permian or Triassic age. In the courseof some months, however, the element of terror did figure with accumulating force. This waswhen the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect of memories, and when my mindbegan to link them with my growing abstract disturbances—the feeling of mnemonic restraint,the curious impressions regarding time, the sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondarypersonality of 1908-13, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person.

As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increaseda thousandfold—until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was then that Ibegan an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling that I might therebyobjectivise 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 dreamshad been so closely duplicated; especially since some of the accounts were too early to admitof any geological knowledge—and therefore of any idea of primitive landscapes—onthe subjects’ part. What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible detailsand explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens—andother things. The actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but what was hinted orasserted by some of the other dreamers savoured of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my ownpseudo-memory was aroused to wilder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctorsdeemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.

I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my sonWingate did the same—his studies leading eventually to his present professorship. In 1917and 1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile my examination of medical, historical,and anthropological records became indefatigable; involving travels to distant libraries, andfinally including even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder lore in which my secondarypersonality had been so disturbingly interested. Some of the latter were the actual copies Ihad consulted in my altered state, and I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notationsand ostensible corrections of the hideous text in a script and idiom which somehow seemedoddly un-human.

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 noteappended 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 recognised human pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakablyakin to the characters constantly met with in my dreams—characters whose meaning I wouldsometimes momentarily fancy I knew or was just on the brink of recalling. To complete my blackconfusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of previous examinations and records of consultationof the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been made by myself in my secondarystate. 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, anthropologicaland medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildnessleft me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me—the fact that the myths were of suchearly existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoiclandscape 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 doubtcreated the general myth-pattern—but afterward the fanciful accretions of the myths musthave reacted on amnesia sufferers and coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read andheard all the early tales during my memory lapse—my quest had amply proved that. Was itnot natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured andmoulded by what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state? A few of the myths had significantconnexions with other cloudy legends of the pre-human world, especially those Hindoo tales involvingstupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern theosophists.

Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind isonly one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet’slong and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towersto the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of manhad crawled out of the hot sea three hundred million years ago. Some had come down from thestars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself; others had arisen swiftly from terrene germsas far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans ofthousands of millions of years, and linkages with other galaxies and universes, were freelyspoken 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, ofa queer and intricate shape resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till onlyfifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race ofall; because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that everwere known or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener mindsto project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, andstudy 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 wholeof earth’s annals—histories and descriptions of every species that had ever beenor 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 everyera 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 recognised senses,was harder to glean than knowledge of the future.

In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanicalaid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till itapproached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverablerepresentative of the highest of that period’s life-forms; entering the organism’sbrain and setting up therein its own vibrations while the displaced mind would strike back tothe period of the displacer, remaining in the latter’s body till a reverse process wasset up. The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as amember of the race whose outward form it wore; learning as quickly as possible all that couldbe learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.

Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer’s age andbody, would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and wouldbe drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in itsown 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, clevermachines 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 otherorgans attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by theclicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, andwalked 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 lostit* horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new environment andexperience 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 intitan airships or on the huge boat-like atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads,and to delve freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet’s past andfuture. This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, andto such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth—closed chapters of inconceivablepasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own naturalages—forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experienceof life.

Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seizedfrom the future—to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousandor a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously intheir own languages of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be filed inthe great central archives.

It may be added that there was one sad special type of captive whose privilegeswere far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, whosebodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced withdeath, sought to escape mental extinction. Such melancholy exiles were not as common as mightbe expected, since the longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life—especiallyamong those superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection ofelder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later history—includingmankind’s.

As for the ordinary cases of exploration—when the displacing mind hadlearned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had startedits flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in its own body in itsown age, while the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to which it properlybelonged. Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this restorationimpossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had—like those of the death-escapers—tolive out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive mind—like the dying permanentexiles—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—anot infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with itsown future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight—largelybecause of the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race minds bythe moribund. Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offendingminds in their new future bodies—and sometimes forced re-exchanges were effected. Complexcases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in various regionsof 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 pastages, 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’sage—this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in the general carryingforward of knowledge in large quantities. The few existing instances of clear transmission hadcaused, and would cause at known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequenceof two cases of the kind (said the old myths) that mankind had learned what it had concerningthe Great Race. Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distantworld, there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, andparts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.

Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and mostfragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could be eradicatedwere eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the timeof the first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memorieshad at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages. There probably never wasa time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of these hints. In the Necronomiconthe presence of such a cult among human beings was suggested—a cult that sometimes gaveaid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race.

And meanwhile the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turnedto the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring theirpasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-deadorb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come—for the mind of the Great Racewas 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 senttheir minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them—the cone-shapedthings that peopled our earth a billion years ago. Thus the Great Race came to be, while themyriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the racewould again face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds intothe bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them.

Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around1920, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the tension whichtheir earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the fancies prompted by blindemotions, were not most of my phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have turned mymind to dark studies during the amnesia—and then I read the forbidden legends and metthe members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the material for thedreams and disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory. As for the marginal notesin dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but laid at my door by librarians—Imight easily have picked up a smattering of the tongues during my secondary state, while thehieroglyphs were doubtless coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and afterwardwoven 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 continuedto worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant folklorewas undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present. Probably all the other victimswhose cases were like mine had had a long and familiar knowledge of the tales I had learnedonly when in my secondary state. When these victims had lost their memory, they had associatedthemselves with the creatures of their household myths—the fabulous invaders supposedto displace men’s minds—and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge which theythought 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 mindsinstead of as the displacers. Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the conventionalmyth-pattern.

Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally tosupersede 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 withme. The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end I had areally effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still assailed me. SupposeI did see strange things at night? These were only what I had heard and read of. Suppose I didhave odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too, were only echoes of mythsabsorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that I might dream, nothing that I might feel, couldbe of any actual significance.

Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, eventhough the visions (rather than the abstract impressions) steadily became more frequent andmore disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular work again, and put mynewly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting an instructorship in psychology at theuniversity. My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled—besideswhich, methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son was at thistime just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his present professorship, and weworked together a great deal.

IV.

I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outré dreams which crowded uponme so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as a psychologicaldocument. The glimpses still seemed damnably like memories, though I fought off thisimpression with a goodly measure of success. In writing, I treated the phantasmata as thingsseen; 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, filteringout as such things will, had aroused sundry rumours regarding my mental health. It is amusingto reflect that these rumours were confined wholly to laymen, without a single champion amongphysicians or psychologists.

Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accountsand records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the curiousinhibitions 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 dreamsI seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of wandering. I floated throughmany strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passageswhich seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealedtrap-doors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung. Isaw tremendous 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 whollystrange to me, and whose sound manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. Imay here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised in the visionaryworld.

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 buildingand in the streets below. These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I couldtrace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous iridescentcones, 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 afoot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimescontracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminatingtwo of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpet-likeappendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameterand having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this headwere four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangledeight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with arubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.

Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance—forit is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one has known only human beings todo. These objects moved intelligently around the great rooms, getting books from the shelvesand taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing diligently with apenlike rod gripped in the greenish head-tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carryingbooks and in conversation—speech consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping. The objectshad 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, althoughit was frequently raised or lowered. The other three great members tended to rest downward onthe sides of the cone, contracted to about five feet each, when not in use. From their rateof reading, writing, and operating their machines (those on the tables seemed somehow connectedwith 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-shapedcars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they seemed to form supremely natural parts of theirenvironment. Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared tobe under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical variation, had a diversityof gestures and habits which marked them off not only from the majority, but very largely fromone another. They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters—neverthe typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used our own familiaralphabet. 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 disembodiedconsciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal; floating freely about, yet confinedto the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until August, 1915, did any suggestions ofbodily existence begin to harass me. I say harass, because the first phase was a purelyabstract though infinitely terrible association of my previously noted body-loathing with thescenes of my visions. For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down atmyself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the strangerooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great tables—whose heightcould 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 ofenormous 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 Iwaked 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 thesevisions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknownentities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at the greattables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head. Snatches ofwhat I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible annals of other worldsand other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes. There wererecords of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightfulchronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after thedeath of the last human being. And I learned of chapters in human history whose existence noscholar 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 anagglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages. Other volumeswere in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way. A very few were in languages Iknew. 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 inEnglish. On waking, I could recall only minute and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongueswhich 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 orthe old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities around me wereof the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds intoevery age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my bodyin that age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemedto talk, in some odd language of claw-clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner ofthe solar system.

There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculableepochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthlyminds 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 worshippersof Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens ofearth’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 horribleperil; and several from different branches of humanity.

I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire ofTsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed brown peoplewho held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named BartolomeoCorsi; with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land 100,000 years beforethe squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it; with that of Nug-Soth, a magicianof the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000; 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 14thDynasty 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; withthat of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown,who will die in A.D. 2518; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with thatof Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200; with that of an aged Frenchman of LouisXIII’s time named Pierre-Louis Montmagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftainof B.C. 15,000; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzyingmarvels I learned from them.

I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify ordiscredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional factstook on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent suchsurprising 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-humanentities 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 creamof the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as theearth’s span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space—toanother stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But therewould be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filledcore, before the utter end.

Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age whichI was preparing—half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library and travelopportunities—for the Great Race’s central archives. The archives were in a colossalsubterranean structure near the city’s centre, which I came to know well through frequentlabours and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the fiercestof 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 cellulosefabric, were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases ofa strange, extremely light rustless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designsand bearing the title in the Great Race’s curvilinear hieroglyphs. These cases were storedin tiers of rectangular vaults—like closed, locked shelves—wrought of the same rustlessmetal and fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specificplace in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level—the section devoted to the cultureof 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 werethe merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments were not unfoldedin their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea of my own living arrangementsin the dream-world; though I seem to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictionsas a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid travels overthe mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and explorations of some of the vast darkwindowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea-voyagesin 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 oceanwere other cities of the Great Race, and on one far continent I saw the crude villages of theblack-snouted, winged creatures who would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race hadsent its foremost minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberantgreen life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayedsigns of volcanic forces.

Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race’smechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetableor synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in theheavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I could vaguely recogniselesser, archaic prototypes of many forms—dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts,rhamphorhynci, plesiosaurs, and the like—made familiar through palaeontology. Of birdsor mammals there were none that I could discern.

The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles,while insects buzzed incessantly amidst the lush vegetation. And far out at sea unspied andunknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was takenunder the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrorsof 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 GreatRace my visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I here setdown 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 manyphases; so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance, and formed verificationsof 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 pseudo-memories.

The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies occupied bythe Great Race represented no surviving—or even scientifically known—line of terrestrialevolution, but were of a peculiar, closely hom*ogeneous, and highly specialised organic typeinclining as much to the vegetable as to the animal state. Cell-action was of an unique sortalmost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilatedthrough the red trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always semi-fluidand in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals. The beings had but two of thesenses which we recognise—sight and hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-likeappendages on the grey stalks above their heads—but of other and incomprehensible senses(not, however, well utilisable by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies) they possessedmany. 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 reproducedthrough 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, rearedonly in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals; four or five thousand yearsbeing the common life span.

Markedly defective individuals were quietly disposed of as soon as their defectswere noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch orof physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms. The dead were incinerated with dignifiedceremonies. Once in a while, as before mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forwardprojection in time; but such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind fromthe 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, withmajor institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economicsystem 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 certaineducational and psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties amongpersons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents.

Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most markedin those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on theother 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 andcopied 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 partof life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and meridian. Technologywas enormously stimulated through the constant struggle to survive, and to keep in existencethe physical fabric of great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primaldays.

Crime was surprisingly scanty, and was dealt with through highly efficientpolicing. 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 and octopodicinvaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centred in the Antarctic, was infrequentthough infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendouselectrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connectedwith the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doorsin the lowest subterrene levels.

This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspokensuggestion—or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on itwas significantly absent from such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one subjectlying altogether under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horriblebygone struggles, and with that future peril which would some day force the race to send itskeener minds ahead en masse in time. Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presentedby dreams and legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths avoidedit—or perhaps all allusions had for some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myselfand others, the hints were peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referredto the matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of the more sharply observant captiveminds.

According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horribleelder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurablydistant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundredmillion years ago. They were only partly material—as we understand matter—and theirtype of consciousness and media of perception differed wholly 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 implementsof normal matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing—albeitof a peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, theirsubstance 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 meansof levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effectedby the Great Race.

When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt citiesof windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was when theminds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure trans-galactic world known inthe disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith. The newcomers, with the instruments theycreated, had found it easy to subdue the predatory entities and drive them down to those cavernsof inner earth which they had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit. Then theyhad sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most of their greatcities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected more with superstitionthan with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.

But as the aeons passed, there came vague, evil signs that the Elder Thingswere growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularlyhideous character in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the desertedelder cities which the Great Race had not peopled—places where the paths to the gulfsbelow had not been properly sealed or guarded. After that greater precautions were taken, andmany of the paths were closed for ever—though a few were left with sealed trap-doors forstrategic use in fighting the Elder Things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places; freshrifts caused by that selfsame geologic change which had choked some of the paths and had slowlylessened the number of outer-world structures and ruins surviving from the conquered entities.

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 moodof horror that the very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned—at no timewas I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like. There were veiled suggestions of amonstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility, while other fragmentarywhispers referred to their control and military use of great winds. Singular whistlingnoises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe-marks, seemed also to be associatedwith them.

It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race—thedoom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange bodiesin the safer future—had to do with a final successful irruption of the Elder Beings. Mentalprojections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race had resolvedthat none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a matter of vengeance, ratherthan an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the planet’s later history—fortheir projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrousentities. 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 weakeningwith the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-humanbeetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant. Meanwhile the Great Race maintained its cautiousvigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subjectfrom common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about thesealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers.

V.

That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every night. I cannothope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in such echoes, for it was upona wholly intangible quality—the sharp sense of pseudo-memory —that such feelingsmainly 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 augmentedby the subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of time. Yet in spite ofeverything 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 withthe kindred cases and the related folklore—ought to be definitely summarised and publishedfor the benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series of articles briefly coveringthe whole ground and illustrated with crude sketches of some of the shapes, scenes, decorativemotifs, and hieroglyphs remembered from the dreams. These appeared at various times during 1928and 1929 in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, but did not attract muchattention. Meanwhile I continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even though thegrowing stack of reports attained troublesomely vast proportions.

On July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me by the Psychological Society theletter which opened the culminating and most horrible phase of the whole mad ordeal. It waspostmarked 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 tremendousan effect it and the photographs had upon me.

I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had oftenthought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends which had colouredmy dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a tangible survival from a lostworld remote beyond all imagination. Most devastating of all were the photographs—forhere, in cold, incontrovertible realism, there stood out against a background of sand certainworn-down, water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex tops and slightlyconcave bottoms told their own story. And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I couldsee all too plainly, amidst the batterings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilineardesigns and occasional hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me. But hereis the letter, which speaks for itself:

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. Mackenzieand Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the Australian end. We were not toospecific with the public about our objects, since the whole matter would have lent itself unpleasantlyto sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper newspapers. As a result, printed reportswere sparing; but enough appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and tochronicle our various preparatory steps.

Professors William Dyer of the college’s geology department (leader ofthe Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930-31), Ferdinand C. Ashley of the departmentof ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of anthropology—together withmy son Wingate—accompanied me. My correspondent Mackenzie came to Arkham early in 1935and assisted in our final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affableman of about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of Australiantravel. He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer of sufficientlylight draught to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most carefuland scientific fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might seemto be in or near its original situation.

Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, wehad a leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down theRed 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 drearygold fields where the tractors were given their last loads. Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved tobe elderly, pleasant, and intelligent—and his knowledge of psychology led him into manylong discussions with my son and me.

Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length ourparty 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 positiveterror grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the legends—aterror of course abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still besetme with unabated force.

It was on Monday, June 3, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks.I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched—in objective reality—afragment 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 acurvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare and bafflingresearch.

A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages ofwear and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. Aminority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut—like thoseof the floors and pavements in my dreams—while a few were singularly massive and curvedor slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of archesor round window casings. The deeper—and the farther north and east—we dug, the moreblocks we found; though we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. ProfessorDyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn found traces of symbolswhich fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The conditionand scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavalsof cosmic savagery.

We had an aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to differentheights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines—eitherdifferences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were virtually negative; forwhenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some significant trend, he would on his nexttrip 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 anddisagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something which I haddreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a terrible pseudo-familiarityabout 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 emotionsabout that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was curiosity—butmore than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion of memory. I tried allsorts 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 shorteningof my dream-periods. I acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at night—usuallyto the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new impulses seemed subtly to pullme.

Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments ofthe 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 levelthan at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into fantastic temporaryhillocks—exposing some traces of the elder stones while it covered other traces. I wasqueerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same time dreadedwhat might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state—all the worsebecause I could not account for it.

An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to anodd discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of July 11th,when a gibbous moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor. Wandering somewhatbeyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed to differ markedly from any wehad yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared away the sand withmy hands, later studying the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight with my electrictorch. Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convexor concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance wholly dissimilar tothe 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 whollyunconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I fully realisewhy I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed andread about, and which was linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry. It wasone of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held in such fear—thetall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien Things that festered inearth’s nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors weresealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.

I remained awake all that night, but by dawn realised how silly I had beento let the shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a discoverer’senthusiasm. The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, myson, and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had formedno clear idea of the stone’s location, and a late wind had wholly altered the hillocksof shifting sand.

VI.

I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative—all the more difficultbecause I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel uncomfortably sure that Iwas not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feeling—in view of the stupendous implicationswhich 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 wholecase—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 knowthem. 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 thenortheastward terrain, I set out on one of my typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting onlyone person—an Australian miner named Tupper—as I left our precincts. The moon, slightlypast full, shone from a clear sky and drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiancewhich seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. There was no longer any wind, nor did any returnfor nearly five hours, as amply attested by Tupper and others who did not sleep through thenight. The Australian last saw me walking rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillockstoward the northeast.

About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and fellingthree 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 circ*mstancegave no one alarm. And yet as many as three men—all Australians—seemed to feel somethingsinister in the air. Mackenzie explained to Prof. Freeborn that this was a fear picked up fromblackfellow folklore—the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth aboutthe 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 havehappened—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 andunfamiliar 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, andwithout my electric torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but Prof. Dyer was smoking apipe 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, soonjoined 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—differentfrom anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon talking—nervouslyand elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain downin the sand for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than usual—andwhen 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—exercisingthe greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of mind regarding the wholework of the expedition, and earnestly urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My reasoningwas patently weak—for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitiousminers, 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 concernfor my health was very 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 thesake of my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the plane to Perth—a thousandmiles to the southwest—as soon as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone. If, Ireflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a specific warningeven at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the miners who knew the local folkloremight back me up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very afternoon; flying over allthe terrain my walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained insight. It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again—the shifting sandhad wiped out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome objectin my stark fright—but now I know that the loss was merciful. I can still believe my wholeexperience an illusion—especially if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is neverfound.

Wingate took me to Perth July 20, though declining to abandon the expeditionand 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 on the entire matter,and have decided that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him whether to diffusethe matter more widely. In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of mybackground—as already known in a scattered way to others—and will now tell as brieflyas 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, pseudo-mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil, burningmoon. Here and there I saw, half-shrouded by the sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left fromnameless and forgotten aeons. The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous wastebegan 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 minersconcerning the desert and its carven stones.

And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous—more and moreassailed by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of thepossible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and wondered why theyseemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was fumbling and rattling at the latchof my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.

The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward likefrozen 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 ofendless rooms and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols thatI knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race. At moments I fanciedI saw those omniscient conical horrors moving about at their accustomed tasks, and I fearedto look down lest I find myself one with them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-coveredblocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminouscrystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns and cycads beyond the windows. I wasawake and dreaming at the same time.

I do not know how long or how far—or indeed, in just what direction—Ihad walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day’s wind. It was the largestgroup in one place that I had so far seen, and so sharply did it impress me that the visionsof fabulous aeons faded suddenly away. Again there were only the desert and the evil moon andthe shards of an unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electrictorch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round massof megaliths and smaller fragments some forty feet across and from two to eight feet high.

From the very outset I realised that there was some utterly unprecedented qualityabout these stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without parallel, but somethingin the sand-worn traces of design arrested me as I scanned them under the mingled beams of themoon 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 dawnedupon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of these blocks were closely related —partsof one vast decorative conception. For the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upona mass of masonry in its old position—tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none theless existing in a very definite sense.

Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and thereclearing 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 natureof the bygone structure, and at the designs which had once stretched over the vast surfacesof the primal masonry. The perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalledand unnerved me. This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocksand solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the right, and at thefarther 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 morein them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level should havebeen 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 theleft one level above me? How did I know that the room of machines, and the rightward-leadingtunnel to the central archives, ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there wouldbe one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom, four levels down? Bewilderedby 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 ofcool air trickling upward from a depressed place near the centre 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 withinfinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could arguebut 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 undergroundhuts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then thoughts of myown dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What manner of placelay below me? What primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmaresmight I be on the brink of uncovering? It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more thancuriosity 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 compellingfate. 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 astrong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the desert’s dry air. A black riftbegan to yawn, and at length—when I had pushed away every fragment small enough to budge—theleprous 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 wasa chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle of about forty-fivedegrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse from above. Between its surface andthe 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 desert’s sands lay directly upona floor of some titan structure of earth’s youth—how preserved through aeons ofgeologic 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 doubtfulabyss—and at a time when one’s whereabouts were unknown to any living soul—seemslike the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was—yet that night I embarked without hesitancyupon such a descent. Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had allalong seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the battery, Icommenced a mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline below the opening—sometimesfacing forward as I found good hand and foot holds, and at other times turning to face the heapof megaliths as I clung and fumbled more precariously. In two directions beside me, distantwalls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however,was only unbroken blackness.

I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with bafflinghints and images was my mind, that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into incalculabledistances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyleleering impotently at me. Eventually I reached a level floor strown with fallen blocks, shapelessfragments of stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side—perhaps thirtyfeet apart—rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I couldjust discern, but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception. What held me the mostwas the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could not reach the roof, but the lower partsof the monstrous arches stood out distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what Ihad 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 worldoutside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of my sight, lestI have no guide for my return. I now advanced toward the wall on my left, where the traces ofcarving were plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heaphad been, but I managed to pick my difficult way. At one place I heaved aside some blocks andkicked away the detritus to see what the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fatefulfamiliarity of the great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together.

Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the torchlight slowlyand carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed to haveacted 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 thisprimal, 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-crumbledstate, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the complete, intimate familiarityof every detail almost stunned my imagination. That the major attributes of this hoary masonryshould be familiar, was not beyond normal credibility. Powerfully impressing the weavers ofcertain myths, they had become embodied in a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow coming tomy notice during the amnesic period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind. But howcould I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of these strangedesigns tallied with what I had dreamt for more than a score of years? What obscure, forgotteniconography 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, themillennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of something Iknew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreamsshewed 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 anypoint in that structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of uncountedages, I realised with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in God’s name could allthis mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind thoseantique tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?

Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment whichate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain overhead beforethe myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need now, I thoughtwith a shudder, to keep that faint blur of moonlight in view. I was torn betwixt a longing toflee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and driving fatality. What had happened tothis monstrous megalopolis of eld in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of thesubterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all its titan towers, how much hadstill survived the writhings of earth’s crust?

Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still findthe house of the writing-master, and the tower where S’gg’ha, a captive mind fromthe star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blankspaces 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—ahalf-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen millionyears 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 drivethese insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I felt acutelythe coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realised that a vastchain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below me. I thoughtof the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them from my dreams. Wouldthe way to the central archives still be open? Again that driving fatality tugged insistentlyat my brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay cased in those rectangular vaultsof rustless metal.

There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past andfuture, of the cosmic space-time continuum—written by captive minds from every orb andevery age in the solar system. Madness, of course—but had I not now stumbled into a nightedworld as mad as I? I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob-twistingsneeded to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I gone throughthat intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section onthe lowest level! Every detail was fresh and familiar. If there were such a vault as I had dreamedof, 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 tothe depths below.

VII.

From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on—indeed, I still possessa final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemoniac dream—or illusion bornof delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through a kind of haze—sometimesonly intermittently. The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringingphantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay ofa*ges. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber over amighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof. It was allthe ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One thingonly was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressedby a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere humanbody 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—oftenfalling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner ofthat daemoniac gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light throughchoked and crumbling yet familiar archways. Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bareor debris-filled. In a few I saw masses of metal—some fairly intact, some broken, andsome crushed or battered—which I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of mydreams. What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess.

I found the downward incline and began its descent—though after a timehalted by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feetacross. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths beneath. Iknew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh panicas I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no guards now—forwhat had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work and sunk into its long decline.By the time of the post-human beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of thenative legends, I trembled anew.

It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the litteredfloor prevented a running start—but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to theleft-hand wall—where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear ofdangerous debris—and after one frantic moment reached the other side in safety. At lastgaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines, within whichwere fantastic ruins of metal half-buried beneath fallen vaulting. Everything was where I knewit would be, and I climbed confidently over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transversecorridor. 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 thatdebris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the age-stained walls—somefamiliar, others seemingly added since the period of my dreams. Since this was a subterrenehouse-connecting highway, there were no archways save when the route led through the lower levelsof various buildings. At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look downwell-remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any radicalchanges from what I had dreamed of—and in one of these cases I could trace the sealed-upoutlines of the archway I remembered.

I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steereda hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great windowless ruined towerswhose alien basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible origin. This primal vault was roundand fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floorwas here free from anything save dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading upwardand downward. There were no stairs or inclines—indeed, my dreams had pictured those eldertowers as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built them had not neededstairs or inclines. In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervouslyguarded. 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 reacheda place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I climbed upover it, passing through a vast empty space where my torchlight could reveal neither walls norvaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the metal-purveyors, frontingon 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 stones, butafter a short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touchedthe perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to afforda passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least shift of equilibriummight have brought down all the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush me to nothingness, Ido not know. It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me—if, indeed, my whole undergroundadventure was not—as I hope—a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make—ordream that I made—a passage that I could squirm through. As I wriggled over the moundof debris—my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply within my mouth—I feltmyself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.

I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed toform my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my wayalong the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I cameat last to a low, circular crypt with arches—still in a marvellous state of preservation—openingoff on every side. The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, weredensely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols—some added since theperiod of my dreams.

This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through afamiliar archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to allthe surviving levels, I had oddly little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing theannals of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and strength to last as longas that system itself. Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and boundwith cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet’srocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stoodin all its essential contours; the vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litterelsewhere 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 offebrile speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aislesbeyond the archway. I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every handthe great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprungopen, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enoughto shatter the titan masonry. Here and there a dust-covered heap below a gaping empty shelfseemed to indicate where cases had been shaken down by earth-tremors. On occasional pillarswere great symbols or letters proclaiming classes and sub-classes of volumes.

Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metalcases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one ofthe thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It wastitled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of thecharacters seemed subtly unusual. The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly wellknown 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; thethin metal covers opening at the top. Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriadcycles of time they had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn lettersof the text—symbols utterly unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabetknown to human scholarship—with a haunting, half-aroused memory. It came to me that thiswas the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams—a mind froma large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and lore of the primal planetwhereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives wasdevoted to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets.

As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of mytorch 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 tanglesof aisles and corridors—recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyedby the acoustic conditions which made my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs ofaeon-long death and silence. The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untroddendust made me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feetpressed upon those immemorial pavements. Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my consciousmind held no hint. There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will andburied recollections, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.

I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashedby me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begunto 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 likea modern safe with a combination lock. Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How anydream—or scrap of unconsciously absorbed legend—could have taught me a detail sominute, so intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond allcoherent thought. For was not this whole experience—this shocking familiarity with a setof unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of everything before me with what onlydreams and scraps of myth could have suggested—a horror beyond all reason? Probably itwas my basic conviction then—as it is now during my saner moments—that I was notawake 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. Therewas a space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor, and as I drew near it Irecalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the metal-barred and closelyguarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that account I trembled and tiptoedas 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 anotherdirection. 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. Aheadthe shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly coveredwith dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a fresh wave of panicclutched 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 earthand had echoed at intervals to the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when Iwas nearly across the space that I realised why I shook so violently.

Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troublingme. In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be—therewere places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I couldnot be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicionof regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting. When I brought the torchlightclose to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw—for the illusion of regularitybecame very great. It was as if there were regular lines of composite impressions—impressionsthat went in threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circularthree-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 havebeen illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about the wayI thought they ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered downnot 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 myfear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that hideous suspicion of prints and thecreeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook with fright, still twitchedrhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past theheap of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken dust towarda point which I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well. My mind was asking itself questionswhose origin and relevancy I was only beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by ahuman body? Could my human hand master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would thelock be undamaged and workable? And what would I do—what dare I do—with what (asI now commenced to realise) I both hoped and feared to find? Would it prove the awesome, brain-shatteringtruth of something past normal conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?

The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoe racing and was standing still, staringat a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfectpreservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open. My feelings towardthese 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 Icould climb to best advantage. An open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the locksof the closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch betweenmy 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 movablefastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered whether the lock wouldbe undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hopedthe 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 begunto climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but as I had expected, the opened shelf helpedgreatly. I used both the difficultly swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in myascent, and managed to avoid any loud creaking. Balanced on the upper edge of the door, andleaning 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-rhythmwas strong in them. Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate secret motions had somehow reachedmy brain correctly in every detail—for after less than five minutes of trying there camea click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously anticipatedit. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging open with only the faintest gratingsound.

Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case-ends thus exposed, and felt atremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand wasa case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than oneof mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, andease it over toward myself without any violent noise. Like the other case I had handled, itwas slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in size, with curved mathematical designs inlow relief. In thickness it just exceeded three inches. Crudely wedging it between myself andthe surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the fastener and finally got the hook free. Liftingthe 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 frontof me. My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed—andfelt 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 werenot 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 fascinatedlyat the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in prime condition, and the curvilinearletters 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 abnormalmemory. I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporisedand made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the battery.Then, in the dark, I screwed up my courage—finally lifting the cover without turning onthe light. Last of all I did indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page—steeling myselfin advance to suppress any sound no matter what I should find.

I looked for an instant, then almost collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however,I kept silence. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfingblackness. What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space hadbecome a mockery. I must be dreaming—but I would test the horror by carrying this thingback and shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even thoughthere were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl around me. Ideas and images ofthe starkest terror—excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened up—began to throngin upon me and cloud my senses.

I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound ofmy own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as aserpent’s victim may look at his destroyer’s eyes and fangs. Then, with clumsy fingersin the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid and the curioushooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer world if it truly existed—ifthe 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—thatI 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 silentpanic past the draught-giving abyss and those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautionsas I climbed up the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension whichI had not felt on the downward journey.

I dreaded having to re-pass through that black basalt crypt that was olderthan the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of thatwhich the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking—be it ever so weakand dying—down there. I thought of those possible five-circle prints and of what my dreamshad told me of such prints—and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them.And I thought of the tales of the modern blacks, wherein the horror of great winds and namelesssubterrene ruins was dwelt upon.

I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last—afterpassing that other book I had examined—to the great circular space with the branchingarchways. On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. ThisI now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled stateof the masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-cased burden weighed upon me, andI 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 wrencheda scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite; for my first passage hadmade some noise, and I now—after seeing those possible prints—dreaded sound aboveall things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice. But I clamberedup 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 Itried 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 lungedfor it at once, and regained it without further noise—but a moment afterward the slippingof blocks under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.

The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answeredin a terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, likenothing else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. It may have been only myimagination. 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 handand clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brainbeyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlightwhich lay so far above. I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which toweredinto the vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scramblingup its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments. Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindlycrossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I foundmyself involved in a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split theblack cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.

I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragmentof consciousness shews me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor amidstthe clangour—case and torch still with me. Then, just as I approached that primal basaltcrypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, therebecame 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 behindbut ahead of me.

Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying throughthe hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping upfrom the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too—notmerely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidlyfrom that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.

There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, withthat torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twistpurposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath. Thoughin my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if itacted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered overa great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface. I recall glimpsingthe archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline leading downto where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But instead ofcrying out I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soonawake. Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolsteredup 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 tooracked 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 backwardtug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of thenameless 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 memorywhen I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behindme were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawninggulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me —tidesof abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.

Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed—andignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upwardover 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 apandaemoniac vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.

This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressionsbelong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoric delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildlytogether in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anythingreal. There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, anda 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 peopledby floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowlessbasalt towers upon which no light ever shone.

Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brainwithout the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildestof my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapour clutchedand picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternationsof babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.

Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams—not inruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingledwith crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the loftycorridors and vast inclines. Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful momentaryflashes of a non-visual consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutchingtentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowingthrough 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, diffusesuspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind-pursued climbingand crawling—of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debriswhich slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beatingof that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once known asthe objective, waking world.

I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and aroundme 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 consciousnessreturned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where true memory left off and deliriousdream began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrousrevelation 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 sucha case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw onlythe sterile, undulant sands of the waste.

The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly inthe west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truthhad happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body overmiles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer? For in this newdoubt all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellisholder doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemousreachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but aterrible, soul-shattering actuality.

Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundredand fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present bodybeen the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, asthe captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in itsprimordial 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, monstrousmemories? 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 worldfor the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others—those shocking ElderThings of the mad winds and daemon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waitingand slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennialcourses on the planet’s age-racked surface?

I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope.Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out oftime. But mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of mymyth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so farthose subterrene corridors have not been found. If the laws of the universe are kind, they willnever be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgmentas a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account toothers.

I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hingesabsolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean buried ruins. It hasbeen hard for me literally to set down the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failedto guess it. Of course it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I priedout of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed 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 flashedmy torch upon it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letterson the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’syouth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of theEnglish language in my own handwriting.

I.

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowingwhy. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplatedinvasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and meltingof the ancient ice-cap—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 willseem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs,both ordinary and aërial, will count in my favour; 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 strangenessof 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 leaderswho have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideouslyconvincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; andon the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rashand overambitious programme in the region of those mountains of madness. It is an unfortunatefact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates, connected only with a smalluniversity, have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre orhighly controversial nature are concerned.

It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialistsin the fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a geologist my object in leading theMiskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock andsoil from various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised byProf. Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any otherfield than this; but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different pointsalong previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreachedby the ordinary methods of collection. Pabodie’s drilling apparatus, as the public alreadyknows from our reports, was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity tocombine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rockdrill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel head, jointedrods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removalauger, and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to 1000 feet deep all formed,with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry; this beingmade possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were fashioned.Four large Dornier aëroplanes, designed especially for the tremendous altitude flying necessaryon the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out byPabodie, could transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrierto various suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serveus.

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 theplateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott,and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by aëroplane and involving distances greatenough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amountof material; especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimenshad previously been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of theupper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life-history of this bleak realm of ice and deathis of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth’s past. That the antarcticcontinent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life ofwhich 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 apertureby blasting in order to get specimens of suitable size and condition.

Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the uppersoil or rock, were to be confined to exposed or nearly exposed land surfaces—these inevitablybeing slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying thelower levels. We could not afford to waste drilling depth on any considerable amount of mereglaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in thick clustersof 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 expeditionsuch as ours—that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow despitethe warnings I have issued since our return from the antarctic.

The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wirelessreports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later articlesof Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four men from the University—Pabodie, Lake of thebiology department, Atwood of the physics department (also a meteorologist), and I representinggeology and having nominal command—besides sixteen assistants; seven graduate studentsfrom Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aëroplanepilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigationwith compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships—woodenex-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 inBoston, and there our ships were loaded. We were marvellously well-equipped for our specificpurposes, and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp constructionwe 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—amplethough it was—so little noticed by the world at large.

As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbour on September 2, 1930;taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoaand Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our exploringparty 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, andGeorg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic —both veteran whalers in antarcticwaters. As we left the inhabited world behind the sun sank lower and lower in the north, andstayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62° South Latitude we sightedour first icebergs—table-like objects with vertical sides—and just before reachingthe Antarctic Circle, which we crossed on October 20 with appropriately quaint ceremonies, wewere considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerablyafter our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigours tocome. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these includinga strikingly vivid mirage—the first I had ever seen—in which distant bergs becamethe battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thicklypacked, we regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175°. On the morningof October 26 a strong “land blink” appeared on the south, and before noon we allfelt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which openedout and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknowncontinent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Rangediscovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail down the eastcoast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound at the foot ofthe volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77° 9’.

The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaksof mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the stilllower 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 summitsswept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes heldvague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a widerange, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimlyterrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintingsof Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evillyfabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab AbdulAlhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at thecollege library.

On the seventh of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarilylost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terroron Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretchedoff to the east the low, white line of the great ice barrier; rising perpendicularly to a heightof 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. Inthe afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus.The scoriac peak towered up some 12,700 feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese printof the sacred Fujiyama; while beyond it rose the white, ghost-like height of Mt. Terror, 10,900feet 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—pointedout 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 of

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe. I was interestedmyself because of the antarctic scene of Poe’s only long story—the disturbing andenigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in thebackground, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat sealswere 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 aftermidnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparingto unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on first treadingantarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular point the Scott andShackleton expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano’sslope was only a provisional one; headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham. We landedall our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-meltingoutfit, cameras both ordinary and aërial, aëroplane parts, and other accessories,including three small portable wireless outfits (besides those in the planes) capable of communicatingwith the Arkham’s large outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that wewould be likely to visit. The ship’s outfit, communicating with the outside world, wasto convey press reports to the Arkham Advertiser’s powerful wireless station onKingsport Head, Mass. We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer; but ifthis proved impossible we would winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonic northbefore the freezing of the ice for another summer’s supplies.

I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our earlywork: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on RossIsland and the singular speed with which Pabodie’s apparatus accomplished them, even throughsolid rock layers; our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascentof the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge aëroplanesat the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party—twenty men and 55 Alaskan sledgedogs—was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no really destructivetemperatures 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 rigours ofthis 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 actualexploring material, the fifth being left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storagecache to form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our exploring planeswere lost. Later, when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we would employone or two in a shuttle transportation service between this cache and another permanent baseon the great plateau from 600 to 700 miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. Despite thealmost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests that pour down from the plateau, wedetermined to dispense with intermediate bases; taking our chances in the interest of economyand probable efficiency.

Wireless reports have spoken of the breath-taking four-hour non-stop flightof our squadron on November 21 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 riseloomed 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 frowningand mountainous coastline. At last we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of theultimate south, and even as we realised it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance,towering up to its height of almost 15,000 feet.

The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude86° 7’, East Longitude 174° 23’, and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings andblastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and short aëroplane flights,are matters of history; as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie andtwo of the graduate students—Gedney and Carroll—on December 13-15. We weresome 8500 feet above sea-level, and when experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelvefeet down through the snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the smallmelting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no previous explorerhad ever thought of securing mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstonesthus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was hom*ogeneous with the great bulk ofthe continent to the west, but somewhat different from the parts lying eastward below SouthAmerica—which we then thought to form a separate and smaller continent divided from thelarger one by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved thehypothesis.

In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiselled after boring revealedtheir nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments—notably ferns,seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such molluscs as lingulae and gasteropods—all of whichseemed of real significance in connexion with the region’s primordial history. There wasalso a queer triangular, striated marking about a foot in greatest diameter which Lake piecedtogether from three fragments of slate brought up from a deep-blasted aperture. These fragmentscame 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 geologicaleye 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 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, all six of the students, four mechanics,and I flew directly over the south pole in two of the great planes, being forced down once bya sudden high wind which fortunately did not develop into a typical storm. This was, as thepapers have stated, one of several observation flights; during others of which we tried to discernnew topographical features in areas unreached by previous explorers. Our early flights weredisappointing in this latter respect; though they afforded us some magnificent examples of therichly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had givenus some brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and oftenthe whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreamsand adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerabletrouble in flying, owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescentvoid with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.

At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying 500 miles eastwardwith all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point which would probablybe on the smaller continental division, as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimensobtained there would be desirable for purposes of comparison. Our health so far had remainedexcellent; lime-juice well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperaturesgenerally above zero enabling us to do without our thickest furs. It was now midsummer, andwith haste and care we might be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious winteringthrough 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 aëroplaneshelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing the principal camp buildings withsnow. Our good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.

The outside world knew, of course, of our programme, and was told also of Lake’sstrange and dogged insistence on a westward—or rather, northwestward—prospectingtrip before our radical shift to the new base. It seems he had pondered a great deal, and withalarmingly radical daring, over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading intoit certain contradictions in Nature and geological period which whetted his curiosity to theutmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the west-stretching formationto which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged. He was strangely convinced that the markingwas the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism of considerablyadvanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date—Cambrianif not actually pre-Cambrian—as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highlyevolved life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. Thesefragments, with their odd marking, must have been 500 million to a thousand million years old.

II.

Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of Lake’s startnorthwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or penetrated by human imagination; thoughwe did not mention his wild hopes of revolutionising the entire sciences of biology and geology.His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 11-18 with Pabodie and five others—marredby the loss of two dogs in an upset when crossing one of the great pressure-ridges in the ice—hadbrought up more and more of the Archaean slate; and even I was interested by the singular profusionof evident fossil markings in that unbelievably ancient stratum. These markings, however, wereof very primitive life-forms involving no great paradox except that any life-forms should occurin rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed to see the goodsense of Lake’s demand for an interlude in our time-saving programme—an interluderequiring the use of all four planes, many men, and the whole of the expedition’s mechanicalapparatus. I did not, in the end, veto the plan; though I decided not to accompany the northwestwardparty despite Lake’s plea for my geological advice. While they were gone, I would remainat the base with Pabodie and five men and work out final plans for the eastward shift. In preparationfor this transfer one of the planes had begun to move up a good gasoline supply from McMurdoSound; but this could wait temporarily. I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it isunwise to be at any time without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world of aeon-longdeath.

Lake’s sub-expedition into the unknown, as everyone will recall, sentout its own reports from the short-wave transmitters on the planes; these being simultaneouslypicked up by our apparatus at the southern base and by the Arkham at McMurdo Sound, whencethey were relayed to the outside world on wave-lengths up to fifty metres. The start was madeJanuary 22 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 some300 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 discoveryof slate fragments with several markings approximately like the one which had caused the originalpuzzlement.

Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight inthe teeth of a raw and piercing gale; and when I despatched a message of protest against furtherhazards, Lake replied curtly that his new specimens made any hazard worth taking. I saw thathis excitement had reached the point of mutiny, and that I could do nothing to check this headlongrisk of the whole expedition’s success; but it was appalling to think of his plungingdeeper and deeper into that treacherous and sinister white immensity of tempests and unfathomedmysteries which stretched off for some 1500 miles to the half-known, half-suspected coast-lineof Queen Mary and Knox Lands.

Then, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited message fromLake’s moving plane which almost reversed my sentiments and made me wish I had accompaniedthe party.

After that Pabodie, the men, and I hung breathlessly over the receiver. Thoughtof this titanic mountain rampart 700 miles away inflamed our deepest sense of adventure; andwe rejoiced that our expedition, if not ourselves personally, had been its discoverers. In halfan hour Lake called us again.

Though it was technically sleeping-time, not one of us listeners thought fora moment of retiring. It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo Sound, where the supplycache and the Arkham were also getting the messages; for Capt. Douglas gave out a callcongratulating everybody on the important find, and Sherman, the cache operator, seconded hissentiments. We were sorry, of course, about the damaged aëroplane; but hoped it could beeasily mended. Then, at 11 P.M., came another call from Lake.

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 joinhim as soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie and I would work out the best gasolineplan—just where and how to concentrate our supply in view of the expedition’s alteredcharacter. Obviously, Lake’s boring operations, as well as his aëroplane activities,would need a great deal delivered for the new base which he was to establish at the foot ofthe mountains; and it was possible that the eastward flight might not be made after all thisseason. In connexion with this business I called Capt. Douglas and asked him to get as muchas 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 oughtto establish.

Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay whereMoulton’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 someborings 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 sensationsat being in the lee of vast silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall reaching the skyat the world’s rim. Atwood’s theodolite observations had placed the height of thefive tallest peaks at from 30,000 to 34,000 feet. The windswept nature of the terrain clearlydisturbed Lake, for it argued the occasional existence of prodigious gales violent beyond anythingwe had so far encountered. His camp lay a little more than five miles from where the higherfoothills abruptly rose. I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words—flashedacross a glacial void of 700 miles—as he urged that we all hasten with the matter andget the strange new region disposed of as soon as possible. He was about to rest now, aftera continuous day’s work of almost unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and results.

In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Capt. Douglasat their widely separated bases; and it was agreed that one of Lake’s planes would cometo 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 waitfor a few days; since Lake had enough for immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually the oldsouthern base ought to be restocked; but if we postponed the easterly trip we would not useit till the next summer, and meanwhile Lake must send a plane to explore a direct route betweenhis new mountains and McMurdo Sound.

Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as thecase might be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straight from Lake’sbase to the Arkham without returning to this spot. Some of our conical tents had alreadybeen reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided to complete the job of making a permanentEsquimau village. Owing to a very liberal tent supply, Lake had with him all that his base wouldneed even after our arrival. I wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be ready for the northwestwardmove after one day’s work and one night’s rest.

Our labours, however, were not very steady after 4 P.M.; for about that timeLake began sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day had startedunpropitiously; since an aëroplane survey of the nearly exposed rock surfaces shewed anentire absence of those Archaean and primordial strata for which he was looking, and which formedso great a part of the colossal peaks that loomed up at a tantalising distance from the camp.Most of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones and Permian andTriassic 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 500 millionyears older. It was clear to him that in order to recover the Archaean slate vein in which hehad found the odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from these foothills tothe steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves.

He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of the expedition’sgeneral programme; hence set up the drill and put five men to work with it while the rest finishedsettling the camp and repairing the damaged aëroplane. The softest visible rock—asandstone 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 threehours afterward, following the first really heavy blast of the operation, that the shoutingof the drill crew was heard; and that young Gedney—the acting foreman—rushed intothe camp with the startling news.

They had struck a cave. Early in the boring the sandstone had given place toa 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 latterprobably of teliosts, sharks, and ganoids. This in itself was important enough, as affordingthe first vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet secured; but when shortly afterward thedrill-head dropped through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and doubly intensewave of excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized blast had laid open the subterrenesecret; and now, through a jagged aperture perhaps five feet across and three feet thick, thereyawned before the avid searchers a section of shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fiftymillion 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 extendedoff indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which suggested itsmembership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and floor were abundantly equippedwith large stalactites and stalagmites, some of which met in columnar form; but important aboveall 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 moreCretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species than the greatest palaeontologist could have countedor classified in a year. Molluscs, crustacean armour, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, andearly mammals—great and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the campshouting, and no wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting coldto where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanishedaeons.

When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity he scribbled amessage in his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to despatch 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 mososaurskull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armour-plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing-bones, archaeopteryxdebris, Miocene sharks’ teeth, primitive bird-skulls, and skulls, vertebrae, and otherbones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, xiphodons, dinocerases, eohippi, oreodons, andtitanotheres. There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer, or bovineanimal; hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the Oligocene age, andthat the hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried, dead, and inaccessible state for atleast thirty million years.

On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life-forms was singular inthe highest degree. Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of such typical imbeddedfossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not a particle earlier;the free fragments in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from organisms hithertoconsidered as peculiar to far older periods—even rudimentary fishes, molluscs, and coralsas remote as the Silurian or Ordovician. The inevitable inference was that in this part of theworld there had been a remarkable and unique degree of continuity between the life of over 300million years ago and that of only thirty million years ago. How far this continuity had extendedbeyond the Oligocene age when the cavern was closed, was of course past all speculation. Inany event, the coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some 500,000 years ago—amere yesterday as compared with the age of this cavity—must have put an end to any ofthe primal forms which had locally managed to outlive their common terms.

Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletinwritten and despatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get back. After thatMoulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes; transmitting to me—and to theArkham for relaying to the outside world—the frequent postscripts which Lake senthim by a succession of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers will remember the excitementcreated among men of science by that afternoon’s reports—reports which have finallyled, after all these years, to the organisation of that very Starkweather-Moore Expedition whichI am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I had better give the messages literally as Lakesent them, and as our base operator McTighe translated them from his pencil shorthand.

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. . .

The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almostbeyond description, nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm. McTighe, who had hastilytranslated a few high spots as they came from the droning receiving set, wrote out the entiremessage from his shorthand version as soon as Lake’s operator signed off. All appreciatedthe epoch-making significance of the discovery, and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as the Arkham’s operator had repeated back thedescriptive parts as requested; and myexample was followed by Sherman from his station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache, as wellas by Capt. Douglas of the Arkham. Later, as head of the expedition, I added some remarksto be relayed through the Arkham to the outside world. Of course, rest was an absurdthought amidst this excitement; and my only wish was to get to Lake’s camp as quicklyas I could. It disappointed me when he sent word that a rising mountain gale made early aërialtravel impossible.

But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish disappointment.Lake was sending more messages, and told of the completely successful transportation of thefourteen great specimens to the camp. It had been a hard pull, for the things were surprisinglyheavy; but nine men had accomplished it very neatly. Now some of the party were hurriedly buildinga snow corral at a safe distance from the camp, to which the dogs could be brought for greaterconvenience in feeding. The specimens were laid out on the hard snow near the camp, save forone on which Lake was making crude attempts at dissection.

This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected; for despitethe heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the deceptively flexible tissuesof the chosen specimen—a powerful and intact one—lost nothing of their more thanleathery toughness. Lake was puzzled as to how he might make the requisite incisions withoutviolence 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 unlessthe cave might later yield an unlimited supply. Accordingly he removed the specimen and draggedin one which, though having remnants of the starfish-arrangements at both ends, was badly crushedand partly disrupted along one of the great torso furrows.

Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocativeindeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments hardly able to cut theanomalous tissue, but the little that was achieved left us all awed and bewildered. Existingbiology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no product of any cell-growth scienceknows about. There had been scarcely any mineral replacement, and despite an age of perhapsforty million years the internal organs were wholly intact. The leathery, undeteriorative, andalmost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing’s form of organisation;and pertained to some palaeogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers ofspeculation. At first all that Lake found was dry, but as the heated tent produced its thawingeffect, organic moisture of pungent and offensive odour was encountered toward the thing’suninjured side. It was not blood, but a thick, dark-green fluid apparently answering the samepurpose. By the time Lake reached this stage all 37 dogs had been brought to the still uncompletedcorral near the camp; and even at that distance set up a savage barking and show of restlessnessat the acrid, diffusive smell.

Far from helping to place the strange entity, this provisional dissection merelydeepened its mystery. All guesses about its external members had been correct, and on the evidenceof these one could hardly hesitate to call the thing animal; but internal inspection broughtup 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 respiratory apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide; andthere were odd evidences of air-storage chambers and methods of shifting respiration from theexternal 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 connexion with the main respiratory system, but they presentedanomalies 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 preternaturally 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 centresand connectives arguing the very extremes of specialised development. Its five-lobed brain wassurprisingly advanced; and there were signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through thewiry cilia of the head, involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism. Probablyit had 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 differentiatedfunctions in its primal world; much like the ants and bees of today. It reproduced like thevegetable cryptogams, especially the pteridophytes; having spore-cases at the tips of the wingsand 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 essentialsof animal structure. That it was marine in origin, its symmetrical contour and certain otherattributes 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 aërial. How it could have undergoneits tremendously complex evolution on a new-born earth in time to leave prints in Archaean rockswas so far beyond conception as to make Lake whimsically recall the primal myths about GreatOld Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth-life as a joke or mistake; andthe wild tales of cosmic hill things from Outside told by a folklorist colleague in Miskatonic’sEnglish 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 thistoo facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the older fossils. Ifanything, the later contours shewed decadence rather than higher evolution. The size of thepseudo-feet had decreased, and the whole morphology seemed coarsened and simplified. Moreover,the nerves and organs just examined held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms stillmore complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether, littlecould be said to have been solved; and Lake fell back on mythology for a provisional name—jocoselydubbing his finds “The Elder Ones”.

At about 2:30 A.M., having decided to postpone further work and get a littlerest, 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 begunto limber up their tissues a trifle, so that the head-points and tubes of two or three shewedsigns of unfolding; but Lake did not believe there was any danger of immediate decompositionin the almost sub-zero air. He did, however, move all the undissected specimens closer togetherand throw a spare tent over them in order to keep off the direct solar rays. That would alsohelp to keep their possible scent away from the dogs, whose hostile unrest was really becominga problem even at their substantial distance and behind the higher and higher snow walls whichan increased quota of the men were hastening to raise around their quarters. He had to weightdown the corners of the tent-cloth with heavy blocks of snow to hold it in place amidst therising gale, for the titan mountains seemed about to deliver some gravely severe blasts. Earlyapprehensions about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and under Atwood’s supervisionprecautions were taken to bank the tents, new dog-corral, and crude aëroplane shelterswith snow on the mountainward side. These latter shelters, begun with hard snow blocks duringodd moments, were by no means as high as they should have been; and Lake finally detached allhands from other tasks to work on them.

It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us allto 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 reallymarvellous drills that had helped him make his discovery. Atwood also sent greetings and praises.I gave Lake a warm word of congratulation, 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 despatched a finalmessage to the Arkham with instructions about toning down the day’s news for theoutside world, since the full details seemed radical enough to rouse a wave of incredulity untilfurther substantiated.

III.

None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning; for both the excitementof Lake’s discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were against such a thing. So savagewas the blast, even where we were, that we could not help wondering how much worse it was atLake’s camp, directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it. McTighewas awake at ten o’clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed, but some electricalcondition 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 reachLake. He had not known about the wind, for very little was blowing at McMurdo Sound despiteits 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 moderaterelapse at 2 P.M. After three o’clock it was very quiet, and we redoubled our effortsto get Lake. Reflecting that he had four planes, each provided with an excellent short-waveoutfit, we could not imagine any ordinary accident capable of crippling all his wireless equipmentat once. Nevertheless the stony silence continued; and when we thought of the delirious forcethe wind must have had in his locality we could not help making the most direful conjectures.

By six o’clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after awireless consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps toward investigation.The fifth aëroplane, which we had left at the McMurdo Sound supply cache with Sherman andtwo sailors, was in good shape and ready for instant use; and it seemed that the very emergencyfor which it had been saved was now upon us. I got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to joinme with the plane and the two sailors at the southern base as quickly as possible; the air conditionsbeing apparently highly favourable. We then talked over the personnel of the coming investigationparty; and decided that we would include all hands, together with the sledge and dogs whichI had kept with me. Even so great a load would not be too much for one of the huge planes builtto our especial orders for heavy machinery transportation. At intervals I still tried to reachLake with the wireless, but all to no purpose.

Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30; and reporteda quiet flight from several points on the wing. They arrived at our base at midnight, and allhands at once discussed the next move. It was risky business sailing over the antarctic in asingle aëroplane without any line of bases, but no one drew back from what seemed likethe plainest necessity. We turned in at two o’clock for a brief rest after some preliminaryloading 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’spilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food supply, and other items includingthe plane’s wireless outfit. The atmosphere was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mildin temperature; and we anticipated very little trouble in reaching the latitude and longitudedesignated 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 despatchedto the camp.

Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollectionbecause of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, ofall that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conceptionof external Nature and Nature’s laws. Thenceforward the ten of us—but the studentDanforth and myself above all others—were to face a hideously amplified world of lurkinghorrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from sharing withmankind in general if we could. The newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the movingplane; telling of our non-stop course, our two battles with treacherous upper-air gales, ourglimpse of the broken surface where Lake had sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before, andour sight of a group of those strange fluffy snow-cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as rollingin the wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau. There came a point, though, when oursensations could not be conveyed in any words the press would understand; and a later pointwhen we had to adopt an actual rule of strict censorship.

The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witch-like cones andpinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plane. Despiteour speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence; hence we knew that they must be infinitelyfar off, and visible only because of their abnormal height. Little by little, however, theyrose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits,and to catch the curious sense of phantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarcticlight against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectaclethere was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation; as ifthese stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheresof dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultra-dimensionality. I could not helpfeeling that they were evil things—mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked outover some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud-background held ineffablesuggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; andgave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long deathof this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of thehigher mountain skyline—regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lakehad mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the dream-likesuggestions of primordial temple-ruins on cloudy Asian mountain-tops so subtly and strangelypainted by Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthlycontinent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught sight of VictoriaLand, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of Archaeanmythical resemblances; of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famedplateau of Leng in the primal writings. Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but theracial memory of man—or of his predecessors—is long, and it may well be that certaintales have come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and earlierthan any human world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin forthe fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua wereas alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself. Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, wasnot a region I would care to be in or near; nor did I relish the proximity of a world that hadever bred such ambiguous and Archaean monstrosities as those Lake had just mentioned. At themoment I felt sorry that I had ever read the abhorred Necronomicon, or talked so muchwith that unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the university.

This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre miragewhich burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we drew near the mountains andbegan to make out the cumulative undulations of the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar miragesduring the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the presentsample; but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shudderedas the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubledice-vapours above our heads.

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man orto human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversionsof geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. Therewere truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts hereand there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs; and strange,beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circularplates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were compositecones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated conesand pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrilestructures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at variousdizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheergiganticism. The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms observed anddrawn by the Arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820; but at this time and place, with those dark, unknownmountain 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 seemedto 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 variousnightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted temporary forms of even vaster hideousness. Asthe whole illusion dissolved to churning opalescence we began to look earthward again, and sawthat our journey’s end was not far off. The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzyingly uplike a fearsome rampart of giants, their curious regularities shewing with startling clearnesseven without a field-glass. We were over the lowest foothills now, and could see amidst thesnow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau a couple of darkish spots which we took tobe 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 beyondthem. At length Ropes—the student who had relieved McTighe at the controls—beganto head downward toward the left-hand dark spot whose size marked it as the camp. As he didso, McTighe sent out the last uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from ourexpedition.

Everyone, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the restof our antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report of the tragedywe found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole Lake party by the frightfulwind of the preceding day, or of the night before that. Eleven known dead, young Gedney missing.People pardoned our hazy lack of details through realisation of the shock the sad event musthave caused us, and believed us when we explained that the mangling action of the wind had renderedall eleven bodies unsuitable for transportation outside. Indeed, I flatter myself that evenin the midst of our distress, utter bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely wentbeyond the truth in any specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in what we darednot tell—what I would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from namelessterrors.

It is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc. Whether all could havelived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. The storm, with itsfury of madly driven ice-particles, must have been beyond anything our expedition had encounteredbefore. One aëroplane shelter—all, it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy andinadequate state—was nearly pulverised; and the derrick at the distant boring was entirelyshaken to pieces. The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruisedinto a high polish, and two of the small tents were flattened despite their snow banking. Woodensurfaces left out in the blast were pitted and denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks inthe snow were completely obliterated. It is also true that we found none of the Archaean biologicalobjects in a condition to take outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals from a vast tumbledpile, including several of the greenish soapstone fragments whose odd five-pointed roundingand 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 enclosure near the campbeing almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though the greater breakage on theside next the camp, which was not the windward one, suggests an outward leap or break of thefrantic beasts themselves. All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to explain that thewind may have blown them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-melting machinery at the boringwere too badly damaged to warrant salvage, so we used them to choke up that subtly disturbinggateway to the past which Lake had blasted. We likewise left at the camp the two most shaken-upof 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 broughtback all the books, scientific equipment, and other incidentals we could find, though much wasrather 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 giveGedney up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for relaying; andI think we did well to keep it as calm and non-committal as we succeeded in doing. The mostwe said about agitation concerned our dogs, whose frantic uneasiness near the biological specimenswas to be expected from poor Lake’s accounts. We did not mention, I think, their displayof the same uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones and certain otherobjects in the disordered region; objects including scientific instruments, aëroplanes,and machinery both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had been loosened, moved, or otherwisetampered with by winds that must have harboured singular curiosity and investigativeness.

About the fourteen biological specimens we were pardonably indefinite. We saidthat the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough was left of them to prove Lake’sdescription wholly and impressively accurate. It was hard work keeping our personal emotionsout of this matter—and we did not mention numbers or say exactly how we had found thosewhich we did find. We had by that time agreed not to transmit anything suggesting madness onthe part of Lake’s men, and it surely looked like madness to find six imperfect monstrositiescarefully buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds punched over withgroups of dots in patterns exactly like those on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoicor Tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to have been completelyblown away.

We were careful, too, about the public’s general peace of mind; henceDanforth and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the next day. It wasthe fact that only a radically lightened plane could possibly cross a range of such height whichmercifully limited that scouting tour to the two of us. On our return at 1 A.M. Danforth wasclose to hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff upper lip. It took no persuasion to make himpromise not to shew our sketches and the other things we brought away in our pockets, not tosay anything more to the others than what we had agreed to relay outside, and to hide our camerafilms 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—Danforthis closer mouthed than I; for he saw—or thinks he saw—one thing he will not telleven me.

As all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent; a confirmation ofLake’s opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean slate and other very primal crumpledstrata unchanged since at least middle Comanchian times; a conventional comment on the regularityof the clinging cube and rampart formations; a decision that the cave-mouths indicate dissolvedcalcareous veins; a conjecture that certain slopes and passes would permit of the scaling andcrossing of the entire range by seasoned mountaineers; and a remark that the mysterious otherside holds a lofty and immense super-plateau as ancient and unchanging as the mountains themselves—20,000feet in elevation, with grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin glacial layer andwith low gradual foothills between the general plateau surface and the sheer precipices of thehighest peaks.

This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completelysatisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen hours—a longer time thanour announced flying, landing, reconnoitring, and rock-collecting programme called for—toa long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions; and told truly of our landing on the fartherfoothills. Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt any of theothers into emulating our flight. Had any tried to do that, I would have used every ounce ofmy persuasion to stop them—and I do not know what Danforth would have done. While we weregone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson had worked like beavers over Lake’stwo best planes; fitting them again for use despite the altogether unaccountable juggling oftheir operative mechanism.

We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our oldbase as soon as possible. Even though indirect, that was the safest way to work toward McMurdoSound; for a straight-line flight across the most utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-deadcontinent would involve many additional hazards. Further exploration was hardly feasible inview of our tragic decimation and the ruin of our drilling machinery; and the doubts and horrorsaround us—which we did not reveal—made us wish only to escape from this australworld of desolation and brooding madness as swiftly as we could.

As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without furtherdisasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next day—January 27th—aftera swift non-stop flight; and on the 28th we made McMurdo Sound in two laps, the one pause beingvery brief, and occasioned by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the ice-shelf after wehad cleared the great plateau. In five days more the Arkham and Miskatonic, withall hands and equipment on board, were shaking clear of the thickening field ice and workingup Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria Land looming westward against a troubledantarctic sky and twisting the wind’s wails into a wide-ranged musical piping which chilledmy soul to the quick. Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behindus, 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 matterfirst 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, thoughI think it would help his psychological state if he would consent to do so. It might explainand relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no more than the delusive aftermath of an earliershock. That is the impression I gather after those rare irresponsible moments when he whispersdisjointed things to me—things which he repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a gripon himself again.

It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and someof our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. We might have knownfrom the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results we announced would be enoughto spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown. Lake’s reports of thosebiological monstrosities had aroused naturalists and palaeontologists to the highest pitch;though we were sensible enough not to shew the detached parts we had taken from the actual buriedspecimens, or our photographs of those specimens as they were found. We also refrained fromshewing the more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish soapstones; while Danforth and Ihave closely guarded the pictures we took or drew on the super-plateau across the range, andthe crumpled things we smoothed, studied in terror, and brought away in our pockets. But nowthat Starkweather-Moore party is organising, and with a thoroughness far beyond anything ouroutfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarcticand melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break throughall reticences at last—even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains ofmadness.

IV.

It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to Lake’s campand what we really found there—and to that other thing beyond the frightful mountain wall.I am constantly tempted to shirk the details, and to let hints stand for actual facts and ineluctabledeductions. 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 uneasinesses of our dogs, the missing sledges and otheritems, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of Gedney, and the six insanely buried biologicalspecimens, strangely sound in texture for all their structural injuries, from a world fortymillion years dead. I do not recall whether I mentioned that upon checking up the canine bodieswe found one dog missing. We did not think much about that till later—indeed, only Danforthand I have thought of it at all.

The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and tocertain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of rationale tothe apparent chaos. At the time I tried to keep the men’s minds off those points; forit was so much simpler—so much more normal—to lay everything to an outbreak of madnesson the part of some of Lake’s party. From the look of things, that daemon mountain windmust have been enough to drive any man mad in the midst of this centre of all earthly mysteryand desolation.

The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies—menand dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn and mangledin fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each casecome from strangulation or laceration. The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for thestate of their ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within. It had beenset some distance from the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaeanorganisms, but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in that monstrouswind behind flimsy walls of insufficient height they must have stampeded—whether fromthe wind itself, or from some subtle, increasing odour emitted by the nightmare specimens, onecould not say. Those specimens, of course, had been covered with a tent-cloth; yet the low antarcticsun had beat steadily upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended to makethe strangely sound and tough tissues of the things relax and expand. Perhaps the wind had whippedthe cloth from over them, and jostled them about in such a way that their more pungent olfactoryqualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity.

But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I hadbetter put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last—though with a categorical statementof opinion, based on the first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforthand myself, that the then missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrorswe found. I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some wereincised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was thesame with dogs and men. All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had theirmost solid masses of tissue cut out and removed, as by a careful butcher; and around them wasa strange sprinkling of salt—taken from the ravaged provision-chests on the planes—whichconjured up the most horrible associations. The thing had occurred in one of the crude aëroplaneshelters from which the plane had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced all trackswhich could have supplied any plausible theory. Scattered bits of clothing, roughly slashedfrom the human incision-subjects, hinted no clues. It is useless to bring up the half-impressionof certain faint snow-prints in one shielded corner of the ruined enclosure—because thatimpression did not concern human prints at all, but was clearly mixed up with all the talk offossil prints which poor Lake had been giving throughout the preceding weeks. One had to becareful 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 unharmeddissecting tent, which we entered after investigating the monstrous graves, had something toreveal. It was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the primal monstrosity hadbeen removed from the improvised table. Indeed, we had already realised that one of the siximperfect and insanely buried things we had found—the one with the trace of a peculiarlyhateful odour—must represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake had triedto analyse. On and around that laboratory table were strown other things, and it did not takelong for us to guess that those things were the carefully though oddly and inexpertly dissectedparts of one man and one dog. I shall spare the feelings of survivors by omitting mention ofthe man’s identity. Lake’s anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidencesof their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it we found a curiouslitter of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men, and the canine partswith the other 35 dogs. Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory table, and on the jumbleof 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 threesledges, and certain instruments, illustrated technical and scientific books, writing materials,electric torches and batteries, food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, andthe like, was utterly beyond sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink-blotson certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien fumbling and experimentationaround the planes and all other mechanical devices both at the camp and at the boring. The dogsseemed 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 openin 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 andfur suits which we found lying about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings conceivably dueto 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 apparentdisintegrative madness. In view of just such an eventuality as the present one, we carefullyphotographed all the main evidences of insane disorder at the camp; and shall use the printsto 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 andopen the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help noticingthe resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their clusters of grouped dots, to poor Lake’sdescriptions of the strange greenish soapstones; and when we came on some of the soapstonesthemselves in the great mineral pile we found the likeness very close indeed. The whole generalformation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably suggestive of the starfish-head of the Archaeanentities; and we agreed that the suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitised mindsof Lake’s overwrought party. Our own first sight of the actual buried entities formeda horrible moment, and sent the imaginations of Pabodie and myself back to some of the shockingprimal myths we had read and heard. We all agreed that the mere sight and continued presenceof the things must have coöperated with the oppressive polar solitude and daemon mountainwind in driving Lake’s party mad.

For madness—centring in Gedney as the only possible surviving agent—wasthe 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 harboured wild guesses whichsanity forbade him to formulate completely. Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustiveaëroplane cruise over all the surrounding territory in the afternoon, sweeping the horizonwith field-glasses in quest of Gedney and of the various missing things; but nothing came tolight. The party reported that the titan barrier range extended endlessly to right and leftalike, 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 similitudesto Roerich-painted Asian hill ruins. The distribution of cryptical cave-mouths on the blacksnow-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 scientificzeal 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 lightenedplane with aërial 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 earlytrip; though heavy winds—mentioned in our brief bulletin to the outside world—delayedour start till nearly nine o’clock.

I have already repeated the non-committal story we told the men at camp—andrelayed outside—after our return sixteen hours later. It is now my terrible duty to amplifythis account by filling in the merciful blanks with hints of what we really saw in the hiddentrans-montane world—hints of the revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a nervouscollapse. I wish he would add a really frank word about the thing which he thinks he alone saw—eventhough it was probably a nervous delusion—and which was perhaps the last straw that puthim where he is; but he is firm against that. All I can do is to repeat his later disjointedwhispers about what set him shrieking as the plane soared back through the wind-tortured mountainpass after that real and tangible shock which I shared. This will form my last word. If theplain signs of surviving elder horrors in what I disclose be not enough to keep others frommeddling with the inner antarctic—or at least from prying too deeply beneath the surfaceof that ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and unhuman, aeon-cursed desolation—the responsibilityfor unnamable and perhaps immensurable evils will not be mine.

Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flightand checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass in the range laysomewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about 23,000 or 24,000 feet above sea-level.For this point, then, we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked on our flight ofdiscovery. The camp itself, on foothills which sprang from a high continental plateau, was some12,000 feet in altitude; hence the actual height increase necessary was not so vast as it mightseem. 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-rivensnow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and more the curiously regular formations clingingto the slopes; and thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. The ancientand wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all of Lake’s bulletins, and proved thatthese hoary pinnacles had been towering up in exactly the same way since a surprisingly earlytime in earth’s history—perhaps over fifty million years. How much higher they hadonce been, it was futile to guess; but everything about this strange region pointed to obscureatmospheric influences unfavourable to change, and calculated to retard the usual climatic processesof rock disintegration.

But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave-mouthswhich fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a field-glass and took aërialphotographs whilst Danforth drove; and at times relieved him at the controls—though myaviation 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 regularitywas 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 ofsavage 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 surroundingrock surface. The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Machu Picchu in the Andes, or theprimal 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 blockswhich Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll. How to account for such things inthis place was frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formationsoften have strange regularities—like the famous Giants’ Causeway in Ireland—butthis stupendous range, despite Lake’s original suspicion of smoking cones, was above allelse non-volcanic 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 naturalorifices had been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand. Their numerousness and widedistribution were remarkable, and suggested that the whole region was honeycombed with tunnelsdissolved out of limestone strata. Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within thecaverns, 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 unusualpatterns. Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the camp, he hintedthat the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the primevalgreenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above thosesix buried monstrosities.

We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along towardthe relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally looked down at the snowand ice of the land route, wondering whether we could have attempted the trip with the simplerequipment of earlier days. Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the terrain was far from difficultas such things go; and that despite the crevasses and other bad spots it would not have beenlikely to deter the sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appearedto lead up to wind-bared passes with unusual continuity, and upon reaching our chosen pass wefound that its case formed no exception.

Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and peerout over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even though we had no cause tothink 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 opalescentsky glimpsed betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explainedin literal words. Rather was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association—athing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned andforbidden 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 orpiping 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 asany of the other dark impressions.

We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of 23,570 feet according to theaneroid; 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 thedream-like. Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the one mentioned bypoor 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. Thepass loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept between its jagged and malignly frowningpylons. Beyond it was a sky fretted with swirling vapours and lighted by the low polar sun—thesky 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 passand added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged eloquent glances. And then, havinggained those last few feet, we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampledsecrets of an elder and utterly alien earth.

V.

I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror, and disbeliefin our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay beyond. Of course we musthave 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 theGods 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 onfirst approaching those mountains of madness. We must have had some such normal notions to fallback upon as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endlesslabyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically eurhythmic stone masses which reared theircrumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at itsthickest, and in places obviously thinner.

The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violationof known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully20,000 feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than500,000 years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stonewhich only the desperation of mental self-defence could possibly attribute to any but a consciousand 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 thegreat 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 mazeof squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge. Itwas, 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 horizontalstratum of ice-dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its imageacross the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection. Of course the phantom had beentwisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did not contain; yetnow, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more hideous and menacing than its distantimage.

Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and rampartshad saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in the hundreds of thousands—perhapsmillions—of years it had brooded there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland. “CoronaMundi . . . Roof of the World . . .” All sorts of fantasticphrases sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily down at the unbelievable spectacle. I thoughtagain of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently haunted me since my first sightof this dead antarctic world—of the daemoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or AbominableSnow-Men of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their pre-human implications, ofthe Cthulhu cult, of the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathogguaand the worse than formless star-spawn associated with that semi-entity.

For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very littlethinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gradualfoothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim, we decided that we could see no thinningat all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come. We hadmerely struck, at random, a limited part of something of incalculable extent. The foothillswere more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible city to thealready 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 10to 150 feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composedmostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone—blocks inmany cases as large as 4 x 6 x 8 feet—though in several places it seemed tobe carved out of a solid, uneven bed-rock of pre-Cambrian slate. The buildings were far fromequal in size; there being innumerable honeycomb-arrangements of enormous extent as well assmaller 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, andother rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed groundplan roughly suggested modern fortifications. The builders had made constant and expert useof 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 whichthe towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial debris. Where the glaciationwas transparent we could see the lower parts of the gigantic piles, and noticed the ice-preservedstone bridges which connected the different towers at varying distances above the ground. Onthe exposed walls we could detect the scarred places where other and higher bridges of the samesort had existed. Closer inspection revealed countless largish windows; some of which were closedwith shutters of a petrified material originally wood, though most gaped open in a sinisterand menacing fashion. Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless, and with uneven though wind-roundedupper edges; whilst others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model or else protected byhigher surrounding structures, preserved intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling andpitting. With the field-glass we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural decorationsin horizontal bands—decorations including those curious groups of dots whose presenceon the ancient soapstones now assumed a vastly larger significance.

In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice-sheet deeply rivenfrom various geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn down to the very levelof the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from the plateau’s interior to a cleft inthe foothills about a mile to the left of the pass we had traversed, was wholly free from buildings;and probably represented, we concluded, the course of some great river which in Tertiary times—millionsof years ago—had poured through the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss ofthe great barrier range. Certainly, this was above all a region of caves, gulfs, and undergroundsecrets beyond human penetration.

Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing thismonstrous survival from aeons we had thought pre-human, I can only wonder that we preservedthe 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 poiseto guide the plane, observe many things quite minutely, and take a careful series of photographswhich may yet serve both us and the world in good stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habitmay have helped; for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant curiosityto fathom more of this age-old secret—to know what sort of beings had built and livedin this incalculably gigantic place, and what relation to the general world of its time or ofother times so unique a concentration of life could have had.

For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary nucleusand centre 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 thechaos of terrene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom.Here sprawled a palaeogean megalopolis compared with which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria,Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olathoë in the land of Lomar are recent things of today—noteven of yesterday; a megalopolis ranking with such whispered pre-human blasphemies as Valusia,R’lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City of Arabia Deserta. As we flew abovethat tangle of stark titan towers my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlesslyin realms of fantastic associations—even weaving links betwixt this lost world and someof my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp.

The plane’s fuel-tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had beenonly 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 alevel 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 milesof flight in each direction shewed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry thatclawed up corpse-like 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 andapproached its sinking-place in the great range. The headlands at the stream’s entrancehad been boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons; and something about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designsstirred 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 hollowedout into some sort of rambling stone edifice; but there were at least two exceptions. Of theselatter, one was too badly weathered to disclose what had been on the jutting eminence, whilethe other still bore a fantastic conical monument carved out of the solid rock and roughly resemblingsuch 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 infinitewidth, even though its length along the foothills seemed endless. After about thirty miles thegrotesque stone buildings began to thin out, and in ten more miles we came to an unbroken wastevirtually without signs of sentient artifice. The course of the river beyond the city seemedmarked by a broad depressed line; while the land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness, seemingto 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 attemptat entering some of the monstrous structures would have been inconceivable. Accordingly we decidedto find a smooth place on the foothills near our navigable pass, there grounding the plane andpreparing to do some exploration on foot. Though these gradual slopes were partly covered witha scattering of ruins, low flying soon disclosed an ample number of possible landing-places.Selecting that nearest to the pass, since our next flight would be across the great range andback to camp, we succeeded about 12:30 P.M. in coming down on a smooth, hard snowfield whollydevoid of obstacles and well adapted to a swift and favourable takeoff later on.

It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for so briefa time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this level; hence we merely saw thatthe landing skis were safely lodged, and that the vital parts of the mechanism were guardedagainst the cold. For our foot journey we discarded the heaviest of our flying furs, and tookwith us a small outfit consisting of pocket compass, hand camera, light provisions, voluminousnotebooks 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 theplane on the chance that we might be able to effect a landing, take ground pictures, make drawingsand topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens from some bare slope, outcropping, ormountain 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 mazeswe might be able to penetrate. This had been brought in case we found some cave system withair quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the usual rock-chipping methodof trail-blazing.

Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stonelabyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as keen a sense of imminentmarvels 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; yetthe prospect of actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millionsof years ago—before any known race of men could have existed—was none the less awesomeand potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality. Though the thinness of theair at this prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual; both Danforthand I found ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fallto 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 itsgigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet. For thislatter we headed; and when at last we were able actually to touch its weathered Cyclopean blocks,we felt that we had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgottenaeons normally closed to our species.

This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps 300 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; spacedquite symmetrically along the points of the star and at its inner angles, and with the bottomsabout four feet from the glaciated surface. Looking through these, we could see that the masonrywas fully five feet thick, that there were no partitions remaining within, and that there weretraces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior walls; facts we had indeed guessedbefore, when flying low over this rampart and others like it. Though lower parts must have originallyexisted, all traces of such things were now wholly obscured by the deep layer of ice and snowat this point.

We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher the nearlyeffaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated floor. Our orientation flightshad indicated that many buildings in the city proper were less ice-choked, and that we mightperhaps find wholly clear interiors leading down to the true ground level if we entered thosestructures still roofed at the top. Before we left the rampart we photographed it carefully,and studied its mortarless Cyclopean masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished that Pabodiewere present, for his engineering knowledge might have helped us guess how such titanic blockscould have been handled in that unbelievably remote age when the city and its outskirts werebuilt up.

The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind shriekingvainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the background, was something whose smallestdetails will always remain engraved on my mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any humanbeings but Danforth and me conceive such optical effects. Between us and the churning vapoursof the west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers; its outré and incredible forms impressingus afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid stone, and were it not forthe photographs I would still doubt that such a thing could be. The general type of masonrywas identical with that of the rampart we had examined; but the extravagant shapes which thismasonry took in its urban manifestations were past all description.

Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its infinite bizarrerie,endless variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometricalforms for which an Euclid could scarcely find a name—cones of all degrees of irregularityand truncation; terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion; shafts with odd bulbousenlargements; broken columns in curious groups; and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangementsof mad grotesqueness. As we drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of theice-sheet, and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that connected the crazily sprinkledstructures at various heights. Of orderly streets there seemed to be none, the only broad openswath being a mile to the left, where the ancient river had doubtless flowed through the towninto the mountains.

Our field-glasses shewed the external horizontal bands of nearly effaced sculpturesand dot-groups to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine what the city must once havelooked like—even though most of the roofs and tower-tops had necessarily perished. Asa 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-phantasy against a westward mist through whosenorthern end the low, reddish antarctic sun of early afternoon was struggling to shine; andwhen for a moment that sun encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into temporaryshadow, the effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict. Even the faint howlingand piping of the unfelt wind in the great mountain passes behind us took on a wilder note ofpurposeful 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 artificialterrace had once existed there. Under the glaciation, we believed, there must be a flight ofsteps or its equivalent.

When at last we plunged into the labyrinthine town itself, clambering overfallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresentcrumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount ofself-control we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began making some offensively irrelevantspeculations about the horror at the camp—which I resented all the more because I couldnot help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid survivalfrom nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his imagination, too; for in one place—wherea debris-littered alley turned a sharp corner—he insisted that he saw faint traces ofground markings which he did not like; whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle imaginarysound from some undefined point—a muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that ofthe wind in the mountain caves yet somehow disturbingly different. The ceaseless five-pointednessof the surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimlysinister suggestiveness we could not escape; and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious certaintyconcerning the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place.

Nevertheless our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead; andwe mechanically carried out our programme of chipping specimens from all the different rocktypes represented in the masonry. We wished a rather full set in order to draw better conclusionsregarding the age of the place. Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to date from later thanthe Jurassic and Comanchian periods, nor was any piece of stone in the entire place of a greaterrecency than the Pliocene age. In stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a death which hadreigned at least 500,000 years, and in all probability even longer.

As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped atall available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities. Some wereabove our reach, whilst others led only into ice-choked ruins as unroofed and barren as therampart on the hill. One, though spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless abysswithout visible means of descent. Now and then we had a chance to study the petrified wood ofa surviving shutter, and were impressed by the fabulous antiquity implied in the still discerniblegrain. These things had come from Mesozoic gymnosperms and conifers—especially Cretaceouscycads—and from fan-palms and early angiosperms of plainly Tertiary date. Nothing definitelylater than the Pliocene could be discovered. In the placing of these shutters—whose edgesshewed 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 havebecome wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of their former and probably metallic fixturesand fastenings.

After a time we came across a row of windows—in the bulges of a colossalfive-ridged cone of undamaged apex—which led into a vast, well-preserved room with stoneflooring; but these were too high in the room to permit of descent without a rope. We had arope with us, but did not wish to bother with this twenty-foot drop unless obliged to—especiallyin this thin plateau air where great demands were made upon the heart action. This enormousroom was probably a hall or concourse of some sort, and our electric torches shewed bold, distinct,and potentially startling sculptures arranged round the walls in broad, horizontal bands separatedby equally broad strips of conventional arabesques. We took careful note of this spot, planningto enter here unless a more easily gained interior were encountered.

Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an archwayabout six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end of an aërial bridge whichhad 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 windowsand with a curious bulge about ten feet above the aperture. It was totally dark inside, andthe 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 thoughwe had penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery, it required fresh resolution to carryus actually inside a complete and surviving building of a fabulous elder world whose naturewas becoming more and more hideously plain to us. In the end, however, we made the plunge; andscrambled up over the rubble into the gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slateslabs, 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 realising theprobable complexity of the nest of apartments within, we decided that we must begin our systemof hare-and-hound trail-blazing. Hitherto our compasses, together with frequent glimpses ofthe vast mountain-range between the towers in our rear, had been enough to prevent our losingour way; but from now on, the artificial substitute would be necessary. Accordingly we reducedour 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 gainus immunity from straying, since there did not appear to be any strong air-currents inside theprimordial masonry. If such should develop, or if our paper supply should give out, we couldof 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 guesswithout a trial. The close and frequent connexion of the different buildings made it likelythat we might cross from one to another on bridges underneath the ice except where impeded bylocal collapses and geologic rifts, for very little glaciation seemed to have entered the massiveconstructions. Almost all the areas of transparent ice had revealed the submerged windows astightly shuttered, as if the town had been left in that uniform state until the glacial sheetcame to crystallise the lower part for all succeeding time. Indeed, one gained a curious impressionthat this place had been deliberately closed and deserted in some dim, bygone aeon, rather thanoverwhelmed 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 physiographicconditions attending the formation of the ice-sheet at this point would have to wait for latersolution. It had not, very plainly, been a grinding drive. Perhaps the pressure of accumulatedsnows had been responsible; and perhaps some flood from the river, or from the bursting of someancient glacial dam in the great range, had helped to create the special state now observable.Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion 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 echoedfor the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is especially truebecause so much of the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresentmural carvings. Our flashlight photographs of those carvings will do much toward proving thetruth of what we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had not a larger film supplywith us. As it was, we made crude notebook sketches of certain salient features after all ourfilms 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 innerpartitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the lower levels were excellentlypreserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular differences in floor levels,characterised the entire arrangement; and we should certainly have been lost at the very outsetbut for the trail of torn paper left behind us. We decided to explore the more decrepit upperparts first of all, hence climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of some 100 feet, to wherethe topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the polar sky. Ascent waseffected over the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps or inclined planes which everywhereserved 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 thattheir general average was about 30 x 30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height; thoughmany larger apartments existed. After thoroughly examining the upper regions and the glaciallevel we descended story by story into the submerged part, where indeed we soon saw we werein a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages probably leading over unlimited areasoutside this particular building. The Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism of everything aboutus became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all thecontours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional nuances of the blasphemouslyarchaic stonework. We soon realised from what the carvings revealed that this monstrous citywas many million years old.

We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous balancingand adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the function of the arch was clearly much reliedon. The rooms we visited were wholly bare of all portable contents, a circ*mstance which sustainedour belief in the city’s deliberate desertion. The prime decorative feature was the almostuniversal system of mural sculpture; which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands threefeet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width givenover to geometrical arabesques. There were exceptions to this rule of arrangement, but its preponderancewas overwhelming. Often, however, a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly patterned groupsof dots would be sunk along one of the arabesque bands.

The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolvedto the highest degree of civilised mastery; though utterly alien in every detail to any knownart tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have ever seen couldapproach it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life, were renderedwith astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the conventional designswere marvels of skilful 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. Thepictorial bands followed a highly formalised tradition, and involved a peculiar treatment ofperspective; but had an artistic force that moved us profoundly notwithstanding the interveninggulf of vast geologic periods. Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition ofthe cross-section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical psychologybeyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to compare this art with anyrepresented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will probably find its closest analoguein certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists.

The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines whose depth onunweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot-groups appeared—evidentlyas inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language and alphabet—the depression ofthe smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps a half-inch more.The pictorial bands were in counter-sunk low relief, their background being depressed abouttwo inches from the original wall surface. In some specimens marks of a former colouration couldbe detected, though for the most part the untold aeons had disintegrated and banished any pigmentswhich may have been applied. The more one studied the marvellous technique the more one admiredthe things. Beneath their strict conventionalisation one could grasp the minute and accurateobservation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves servedto symbolise and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated.We felt, too, that besides these recognisable excellences there were others lurking beyond thereach of our perceptions. Certain touches here and there gave vague hints of latent symbolsand stimuli which another mental and emotional background, and a fuller or different sensoryequipment, might have made of profound and poignant significance to us.

The subject-matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the vanishedepoch of their creation, and contained a large proportion of evident history. It is this abnormalhistoric-mindedness of the primal race—a chance circ*mstance operating, through coincidence,miraculously in our favour—which made the carvings so awesomely informative to us, andwhich 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 on an enlarged scale—these things giving a naive and terriblecorroboration to what we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dadoes. In hinting at whatthe whole revealed, I can only hope that my account will not arouse a curiosity greater thansane caution on the part of those who believe me at all. It would be tragic if any were to beallured 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-footdoorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks—elaborately carved andpolished—of the actual shutters and doors. All metal fixtures had long ago vanished, butsome of the doors remained in place and had to be forced aside as we progressed from room toroom. Window-frames with odd transparent panes—mostly elliptical—survived here andthere, 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 soapstonewhich was either broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant removal. Other apertures wereundoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical facilities—heating, lighting, and the like—ofa sort suggested in many of the carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes beeninlaid with green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors were also paved with suchtiles, though plain stonework predominated.

As I have said, all furniture and other moveables were absent; but the sculpturesgave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these tomb-like, echoing rooms.Above the glacial sheet the floors were generally thick with detritus, litter, and debris; butfarther down this condition decreased. In some of the lower chambers and corridors there waslittle more than gritty dust or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncannyair of newly swept immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or collapses had occurred, the lowerlevels were as littered as the upper ones. A central court—as in other structures we hadseen from the air—saved the inner regions from total darkness; so that we seldom had touse our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying sculptured details. Below theice-cap, however, the twilight deepened; and in many parts of the tangled ground level therewas an approach to absolute blackness.

To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetratedthis aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering chaos offugitive moods, memories, and impressions. The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolationof the place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elementswere the recent unexplained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too soon effected bythe 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 thehideous truth—a truth which it would be naive to claim Danforth and I had not independentlysuspected before, though we had carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. Therecould now be no further merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabitedthis monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man’s ancestors were primitive archaicmammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.

We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted—eachto himself—that the omnipresence of the five-pointed motif meant only some cultural orreligious exaltation of the Archaean natural object which had so patently embodied the qualityof five-pointedness; as the decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, thoseof Egypt the scarabaeus, those of Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribessome chosen totem-animal. But this lone refuge was now stripped from us, and we were forcedto face definitely the reason-shaking realisation which the reader of these pages has doubtlesslong ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in black and white even now, butperhaps that will not be necessary.

The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age ofdinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainlessobjects—but the builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces inrocks even then laid down well-nigh a thousand million years . . . rocks laiddown 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 enslaversof that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things likethe Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were theGreat Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young—the beings whosesubstance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had neverbred. And to think that only the day before Danforth and I had actually looked upon fragmentsof their millennially fossilised substance . . . and that poor Lake and his partyhad seen their complete outlines. . . .

It is of course impossible for me to relate in proper order the stages by whichwe picked up what we know of that monstrous chapter of pre-human life. After the first shockof the certain revelation we had to pause a while to recuperate, and it was fully three o’clockbefore we got started on our actual tour of systematic research. The sculptures in the buildingwe entered were of relatively late date—perhaps two million years ago—as checkedup by geological, biological, and astronomical features; and embodied an art which would becalled decadent in comparison with that of specimens we found in older buildings after crossingbridges under the glacial sheet. One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back fortyor possibly even fifty million years—to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous—andcontained 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, Iwould 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 pre-terrestrial lifeof the star-headed beings on other planets, and in other galaxies, and in other universes—canreadily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; yet such partssometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematicsand astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge when they see the photographsI shall publish.

Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fractionof any connected story; nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages of that storyin their proper order. Some of the vast rooms were independent units so far as their designswere concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried through a seriesof rooms and corridors. The best of the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyssbelow even the ancient ground level—a cavern perhaps 200 feet square and sixty feet high,which had almost undoubtedly been an educational centre of some sort. There were many provokingrepetitions of the same material in different rooms and buildings; since certain chapters ofexperience, and certain summaries or phases of racial history, had evidently been favouriteswith different decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same themeproved useful in settling debatable points and filling in gaps.

I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal. Ofcourse, we even now have only the barest outline; and much of that was obtained later on froma study of the photographs and sketches we made. It may be the effect of this later study—therevived memories and vague impressions acting in conjunction with his general sensitivenessand with that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence he will not reveal even to me—whichhas been the immediate source of Danforth’s present breakdown. But it had to be; for wecould not issue our warning intelligently without the fullest possible information, and theissuance of that warning is a prime necessity. Certain lingering influences in that unknownantarctic world of disordered time and alien natural law make it imperative that further explorationbe discouraged.

VII.

The full story, so far as deciphered, will shortly appear in an official bulletin of MiskatonicUniversity. Here I shall sketch only the salient high lights in a formless, rambling way. Mythor 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 entitiessuch as at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering. They seemed able to traverse the interstellarether on their vast membraneous wings—thus oddly confirming some curious hill folklorelong ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. They had lived under the sea a good deal, buildingfantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricatedevices employing unknown principles of energy. Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledgefar surpassed man’s today, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate formsonly when obliged to. Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stageof mechanised life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying.Their preternatural toughness of organisation and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarlyable to live on a high plane without the more specialised 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, thatthey 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 haddone the same thing on other planets; having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certainmulticellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporaryorgans under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work ofthe community. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about asthe “shoggoths” in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arabhad not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certainalkaloidal herb. When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesised their simple foodforms and bred a good supply of shoggoths, they allowed other cell-groups to develop into otherforms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes; extirpating any whose presence becametroublesome.

With the aid of the shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift prodigiousweights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing labyrinths of stone notunlike those which later rose on land. Indeed, the highly adaptable Old Ones had lived muchon 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 whoseaeon-dead corridors we were even then traversing, we were impressed by a curious coincidencewhich we have not yet tried to explain, even to ourselves. The tops of the buildings, whichin the actual city around us had of course been weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, wereclearly displayed in the bas-reliefs; and shewed vast clusters of needle-like spires, delicatefinials on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin, horizontal scalloped discs cappingcylindrical 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 thousandsof years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes across the unfathomed mountains of madness as wefirst approached poor Lake’s ill-fated camp.

Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them migratedto land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had continued the fullest use of theeyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculptureand of writing in quite the usual way—the writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproofwaxen surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths, though they used a curious phosphorescentorganism to furnish light, pieced out their vision with obscure special senses operating throughthe prismatic cilia on their heads—senses which rendered all the Old Ones partly independentof light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and writing had changed curiously during thedescent, embodying certain apparently chemical coating processes—probably to secure phosphorescence—whichthe bas-reliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming—usingthe lateral crinoid arms—and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles containingthe pseudo-feet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two ormore sets of their fan-like folding wings. On land they locally used the pseudo-feet, but nowand then flew to great heights or over long distances with their wings. The many slender tentaclesinto which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate, flexible, strong, and accuratein muscular-nervous coördination; ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artisticand other manual operations.

The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressuresof the deepest sea-bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few seemed to die at all exceptby violence, and their burial-places were very limited. The fact that they covered their verticallyinhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which madea fresh pause and recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings multipliedby means of spores—like vegetable pteridophytes as Lake had suspected—but owingto their prodigious toughness and longevity, and consequent lack of replacement needs, theydid not encourage the large-scale development of new prothalli except when they had new regionsto colonise. The young matured swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any standardwe can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produceda tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions which I shall describe more fully inmy coming monograph. These varied slightly according to sea or land residence, but had the samefoundations 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 underthe sea, but cooked their viands on land. They hunted game and raised meat herds—slaughteringwith sharp weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resistedall ordinary temperatures marvellously; and in their natural state could live in water downto freezing. When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however—nearly a millionyears 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 prehistoricflights through cosmic space, legend said, they had absorbed certain chemicals and became almostindependent of eating, breathing, or heat conditions; but by the time of the great cold theyhad lost track of the method. In any case they could not have prolonged the artificial stateindefinitely without harm.

Being non-pairing and semi-vegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biologicalbasis for the family phase of mammal life; but seemed to organise large households on the principlesof comfortable space-utility and—as we deduced from the pictured occupations and diversionsof co-dwellers—congenial mental association. In furnishing their homes they kept everythingin the centre 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-chemicalin nature. Both on land and under water they used curious tables, chairs, and couches like cylindricalframes—for they rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles—and racks forthe hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books.

Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no certaintiesin this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There was extensive commerce, bothlocal 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 expeditionwere pieces of such currency. Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and muchstock-raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also practiced. Travelwas very frequent, but permanent migration seemed relatively rare except for the vast colonisingmovements by which the race expanded. For personal locomotion no external aid was used; sincein land, air, and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacitiesfor speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden—shoggoths under the sea, anda curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence.

These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life-forms—animaland vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aërial—were the products of unguided evolutionacting on life-cells made by the Old Ones but escaping beyond their radius of attention. Theyhad been suffered to develop unchecked because they had not come in conflict with the dominantbeings. Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to seein some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling primitive mammal, used sometimesfor food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian andhuman foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of land cities the huge stone blocksof the high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretoforeunknown to palaeontology.

The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes andconvulsions of the earth’s crust was little short of miraculous. Though few or none oftheir first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean age, there was no interruptionin their civilisation or in the transmission of their records. Their original place of adventto the planet was the Antarctic Ocean, and it is likely that they came not long after the matterforming the moon was wrenched from the neighbouring South Pacific. According to one of the sculpturedmaps, the whole globe was then under water, with stone cities scattered farther and fartherfrom the antarctic as aeons passed. Another map shews a vast bulk of dry land around the southpole, where it is evident that some of the beings made experimental settlements though theirmain centres were transferred to the nearest sea-bottom. Later maps, which display this landmass as cracking and drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a strikingway 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 thefabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu—soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity andprecipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea—acolossal blow in view of the increasing land settlements. Later peace was made, and the newlands 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 offirst arrival was sacred. From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the centre of theOld Ones’ civilisation, and all the discoverable cities built there by the Cthulhu spawnwere blotted out. Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them the frightfulstone city of R’lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that the Old Ones were again supremeon the planet except for one shadowy fear about which they did not like to speak. At a ratherlater age their cities dotted all the land and water areas of the globe—hence the recommendationin my coming monograph that some archaeologist make systematic borings with Pabodie’stype of apparatus in certain widely separated regions.

The steady trend down the ages was from water to land; a movement encouragedby the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. Another cause ofthe landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths upon whichsuccessful sea-life depended. With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, theart of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost; so that the Old Ones had to dependon the moulding 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 accidentalintelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem.

They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestion of the OldOnes, and had modelled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs and organs;but now their self-modelling powers were sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitativeforms implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a semi-stable brain whoseseparate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeyingit. Sculptured images of these shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing. Theywere normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutinationof 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 apparentorgans of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously oraccording to suggestion.

They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the Permianage, perhaps 150 million years ago, when a veritable war of re-subjugation was waged upon themby the marine Old Ones. Pictures of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in whichthe shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a marvellously fearsome quality despitethe intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbanceagainst the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory. Thereafter the sculpturesshewed a period in which shoggoths were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horsesof the American west were tamed by cowboys. Though during the rebellion the shoggoths had shewnan ability to live out of water, this transition was not encouraged; since their usefulnesson 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 newinvasion from outer space—this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures from aplanet identifiable as the remote and recently discovered Pluto; creatures undoubtedly the sameas those figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered in the Himalayasas the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men. To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, for thefirst time since their terrene advent, to sally forth again into the planetary ether; but despiteall 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 powerlessto disturb those in the sea. Little by little the slow retreat of the elder race to their originalantarctic habitat was beginning.

It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawnand the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely different from that which weknow than was the substance of the Old Ones. They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrationsimpossible for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally come from even remotergulfs of 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-timecontinuum; 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 tothe invading foes are not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmicframework to account for their occasional defeats; since historical interest and pride obviouslyformed their chief psychological element. It is significant that their annals failed to mentionmany advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering cities figure persistentlyin certain obscure legends.

The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with startlingvividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain cases existing science willrequire revision, while in other cases its bold deductions are magnificently confirmed. As Ihave said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all the continents are fragmentsof an original antarctic land mass which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart overa technically viscous lower surface—an hypothesis suggested by such things as the complementaryoutlines of Africa and South America, and the way the great mountain chains are rolled and shovedup—receives striking support from this uncanny source.

Maps evidently shewing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or moreyears ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate Africa from theonce continuous realms of Europe (then the Valusia of hellish primal legend), Asia, the Americas,and the antarctic continent. Other charts—and most significantly one in connexion withthe founding fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around us—shewed all the presentcontinents well differentiated. And in the latest discoverable specimen—dating perhapsfrom the Pliocene age—the approximate world of today appeared quite clearly despite thelinkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe through Greenland, and of SouthAmerica with the antarctic continent through Graham Land. In the Carboniferous map the wholeglobe—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 becamevery plain. The final Pliocene specimen shewed no land cities except on the antarctic continentand 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 madeduring long exploration flights on those fan-like membraneous wings, had evidently declinedto zero among the Old Ones.

Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal rendingof continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea-bottom, and other natural causes was amatter of common record; and it was curious to observe how fewer and fewer replacements weremade as the ages wore on. The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the lastgeneral centre of the race; built early in the Cretaceous age after a titanic earth-bucklinghad obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant. It appeared that this general regionwas the most sacred spot of all, where reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primalsea-bottom. In the new city—many of whose features we could recognise in the sculptures,but which stretched fully an hundred miles along the mountain-range in each direction beyondthe farthest limits of our aërial survey—there were reputed to be preserved certainsacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city, which were thrust up to light afterlong epochs in the course of the general crumpling of strata.

VIII.

Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly personal sense ofawe everything pertaining to the immediate district in which we were. Of this local materialthere was naturally a vast abundance; and on the tangled ground level of the city we were luckyenough to find a house of very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a neighbouringrift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the story of the region much beyondthe period of the Pliocene map whence we derived our last general glimpse of the pre-human world.This was the last place we examined in detail, since what we found there gave us a fresh immediateobjective.

Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible ofall the corners of earth’s globe. Of all existing lands it was infinitely the most ancient;and the conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmareplateau 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 Landon the coast of Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the entire continent. The really high partstretched 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 regionof that long, ice-locked coast whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mawson at the AntarcticCircle.

Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of Nature seemed disturbingly close athand. I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the sculptures forbidme to say that they are earth’s highest. That grim honour is beyond doubt reserved forsomething which half the sculptures hesitated to record at all, whilst others approached itwith obvious repugnance and trepidation. It seems that there was one part of the ancient land—thefirst part that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon and the OldOnes had seeped down from the stars—which had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelesslyevil. 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 frightfulline of peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and chaos—and earth hadreceived her loftiest and most terrible mountains.

If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have beenmuch over 40,000 feet high—radically vaster than even the shocking mountains of madnesswe had crossed. They extended, it appeared, from about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70°to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 100°—less than 300 miles away from the dead city,so that we would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim western distance had it not beenfor that vague opalescent haze. Their northern end must likewise be visible from the long AntarcticCircle coast-line at Queen Mary Land.

Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to thosemountains; but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyond. No human eye hadever seen them, and as I studied the emotions conveyed in the carvings I prayed that none evermight. There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them—Queen Mary and Kaiser WilhelmLands—and I thank heaven no one has been able to land and climb those hills. I am notas sceptical about old tales and fears as I used to be, and I do not laugh now at the pre-humansculptor’s notion that lightning paused meaningfully now and then at each of the broodingcrests, and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those terrible pinnacles all throughthe long polar night. There may be a very real and very monstrous meaning in the old Pnakoticwhispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste.

But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less namelesslyaccursed. Soon after the founding of the city the great mountain-range became the seat of theprincipal temples, and many carvings shewed what grotesque and fantastic towers had piercedthe sky where now we saw only the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts. In the course of agesthe caves had appeared, and had been shaped into adjuncts of the temples. With the advance ofstill 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 ofconnected 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 floweddown from the nameless and horrible westward mountains, and which had formerly turned at thebase of the Old Ones’ range and flowed beside that chain into the Indian Ocean betweenBudd and Totten Lands on Wilkes’s coast-line. Little by little it had eaten away the limestonehill base at its turning, till at last its sapping currents reached the caverns of the groundwaters and joined with them in digging a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk emptied into thehollow hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry. Much of the later city as we now foundit had been built over that former bed. The Old Ones, understanding what had happened, and exercisingtheir always keen artistic sense, had carved into ornate pylons those headlands of the foothillswhere the great stream began its descent into eternal darkness.

This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly theone whose extinct course we had seen in our aëroplane survey. Its position in differentcarvings of the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stagesof the region’s age-long, aeon-dead history; so that we were able to sketch a hasty butcareful map of the salient features—squares, important buildings, and the like—forguidance in further explorations. We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thingas it was a million or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures told us exactlywhat the buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriantTertiary vegetation had looked like. It must have had a marvellous and mystic beauty, and asI thought of it I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which the city’sinhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness and glacial twilight had choked andweighed on my spirit. Yet according to certain carvings the denizens of that city had themselvesknown the clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a sombre and recurrent type of scene inwhich the Old Ones were shewn in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object—neverallowed to appear in the design—found in the great river and indicated as having beenwashed 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 weobtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the city’s desertion. Undoubtedlythere must have been many sculptures of the same age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackenedenergies and aspirations of a stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain evidenceof the existence of others came to us shortly afterward. But this was the first and only setwe directly encountered. We meant to look farther later on; but as I have said, immediate conditionsdictated another present objective. There would, though, have been a limit—for after allhope of a long future occupancy of the place had perished among the Old Ones, there could notbut have been a complete cessation of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was thecoming of the great cold which once held most of the earth in thrall, and which has never departedfrom the ill-fated poles—the great cold that, at the world’s other extremity, putan end to the fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.

Just when this tendency began in the antarctic it would be hard to say in termsof exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at a distance ofabout 500,000 years from the present, but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commencedmuch earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork; but it is quite likely that thedecadent sculptures were made considerably less than a million years ago, and that the actualdesertion of the city was complete long before the conventional opening of the Pleistocene—500,000years 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 shewn in thehouses, and winter travellers were represented as muffled in protective fabrics. Then we sawa series of cartouches (the continuous band arrangement being frequently interrupted in theselate carvings) depicting a constantly growing migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmth—somefleeing to cities under the sea off the far-away coast, and some clambering down through networksof limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the neighbouring black abyss of subterrene waters.

In the end it seems to have been the neighbouring abyss which received thegreatest colonisation. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional sacredness of thisespecial region; but may have been more conclusively determined by the opportunities it gavefor continuing the use of the great temples on the honeycombed mountains, and for retainingthe 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 improvementsalong the connecting routes, including the chiselling of numerous direct tunnels from the ancientmetropolis to the black abyss—sharply down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefullydrew, according to our most thoughtful estimates, on the guide map we were compiling. It wasobvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a reasonable exploring distance of wherewe were; both being on the mountainward edge of the city, one less than a quarter-mile towardthe 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; butthe Old Ones built their new city under water—no doubt because of its greater certaintyof uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears to have been very great, so that theearth’s internal heat could ensure its habitability for an indefinite period. The beingsseem 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 shewed how they had always frequently visited their submarinekinsfolk 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 longantarctic nights.

Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings had a trulyepic quality where they told of the building of the new city in the cavern sea. The Old Oneshad gone about it scientifically; quarrying insoluble rocks from the heart of the honeycombedmountains, and employing expert workers from the nearest submarine city to perform the constructionaccording to the best methods. These workers brought with them all that was necessary to establishthe new venture—shoggoth-tissue from which to breed stone-lifters and subsequent beastsof burden for the cavern city, and other protoplasmic matter to mould into phosphorescent organismsfor lighting purposes.

At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea; its architecturemuch like that of the city above, and its workmanship displaying relatively little decadencebecause of the precise mathematical element inherent in building operations. The newly bredshoggoths grew to enormous size and singular intelligence, and were represented as taking andexecuting orders with marvellous quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimickingtheir voices—a sort of musical piping over a wide range, if poor Lake’s dissectionhad indicated aright—and to work more from spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestionsas in earlier times. They were, however, kept in admirable control. The phosphorescent organismssupplied light with vast effectiveness, and doubtless atoned for the loss of the familiar polarauroras of the outer-world night.

Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain decadence.The Old Ones seemed to realise this falling off themselves; and in many cases anticipated thepolicy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving fromtheir land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped Greece and Asiaof their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater splendours than its own peoplecould create. That the transfer of sculptured blocks had not been more extensive, was doubtlessowing to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned. By the time total abandonmentdid occur—and it surely must have occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced—theOld Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art—or had ceased to recognisethe superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent ruins around us had certainlyundergone no wholesale sculptural denudation; though all the best separate statues, like othermoveables, 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 Onesshuttling 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 ultimatedoom of the land city must have been recognised, for the sculptures shewed many signs of thecold’s malign encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the winterno longer melted completely even in midsummer. The saurian livestock were nearly all dead, andthe mammals were standing it none too well. To keep on with the work of the upper world it hadbecome necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant shoggoths to landlife; 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 hadflown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.

What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new sea-caverncity survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal blackness? Had the subterraneanwaters 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 shewsno trace of their presence. Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land worldof the north? Could one be sure of what might or might not linger even to this day in the lightlessand unplumbed abysses of earth’s deepest waters? Those things had seemingly been ableto withstand any amount of pressure—and men of the sea have fished up curious objectsat times. And has the killer-whale theory really explained the savage and mysterious scars onantarctic seals noticed a generation ago by Borchgrevingk?

The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for theirgeologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a very early date in the landcity’s history. They were, according to their location, certainly not less than thirtymillion years old; and we reflected that in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the cavernitself, had no existence. They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetationeverywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around them, and a great river sweepingnorthward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean.

And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens—especially aboutthe eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake’s hideously ravaged camp. There wassomething abnormal about that whole business—the strange things we had tried so hard tolay to somebody’s madness—those frightful graves—the amount and natureof the missing material—Gedney—the unearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities,and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now shewed the race to have. . . .Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last few hours, and were prepared to believe andkeep 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 immediateobjective. This of course had to do with the chiselled avenues to the black inner world, ofwhose existence we had not known before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse. Fromthe evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply descending walk of about a milethrough either of the neighbouring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy sunlesscliffs above the great abyss; down whose side adequate paths, improved by the Old Ones, ledto the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this fabulous gulf in stark realitywas a lure which seemed impossible of resistance once we knew of the thing—yet we realisedwe must begin the quest at once if we expected to include it on our present flight.

It was now 8 P.M., and we had not enough battery replacements to let our torchesburn on forever. We had done so much of our studying and copying below the glacial level thatour battery supply had had at least five hours of nearly continuous use; and despite the specialdry cell formula would obviously be good for only about four more—though by keeping onetorch unused, except for especially interesting or difficult places, we might manage to ekeout 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 coursewe intended to revisit the place for days and perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography—curiosityhaving long ago got the better of horror—but just now we must hasten. Our supply of trail-blazingpaper was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketchingpaper to augment it; but we did let one large notebook go. If worst came to worst, we couldresort to rock-chipping—and of course it would be possible, even in case of really lostdirection, to work up to full daylight by one channel or another if granted sufficient timefor plentiful trial and error. So at last we set off eagerly in the indicated direction of thenearest tunnel.

According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired tunnel-mouthcould not be much more than a quarter-mile from where we stood; the intervening space shewingsolid-looking buildings quite likely to be penetrable still at a sub-glacial level. The openingitself would be in the basem*nt—on the angle nearest the foothills—of a vast five-pointedstructure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial nature, which we tried to identify fromour aërial survey of the ruins. No such structure came to our minds as we recalled ourflight, hence we concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had beentotally shattered in an ice-rift we had noticed. In the latter case the tunnel would probablyturn out to be choked, so that we would have to try the next nearest one—the one lessthan a mile to the north. The intervening river-course prevented our trying any of the moresoutherly tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighbouring ones were choked itwas doubtful whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly one—abouta mile beyond our second choice.

As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and compass—traversingrooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upperfloors 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 falseleads and retracing our way (in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), andonce in a while striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight poured or trickleddown—we were repeatedly tantalised by the sculptured walls along our route. Many musthave told tales of immense historical importance, and only the prospect of later visits reconciledus to the need of passing them by. As it was, we slowed down once in a while and turned on oursecond torch. If we had had more films we would certainly have paused briefly to photographcertain 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 hintrather than state, is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the rest in order tojustify my course in discouraging further exploration. We had wormed our way very close to thecomputed site of the tunnel’s mouth—having crossed a second-story bridge to whatseemed plainly the tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor especially richin decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of late workmanship—when,about 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 notprecisely say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-pure air, but after a few seconds ourmemories reacted only too definitely. Let me try to state the thing without flinching. Therewas an odour—and that odour was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had nauseatedus 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 thisfar, we were loath to be balked by anything short of certain disaster. Anyway, what we musthave suspected was altogether too wild to believe. Such things did not happen in any normalworld. It was probably sheer irrational instinct which made us dim our single torch—temptedno longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from the oppressivewalls—and which softened our progress to a cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the increasinglylittered floor and heaps of debris.

Danforth’s eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewisehe who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many half-choked archesleading to chambers and corridors on the ground level. It did not look quite as it ought aftercountless thousands of years of desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more light we sawthat a kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked through it. The irregular nature ofthe litter precluded any definite marks, but in the smoother places there were suggestions ofthe dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there was a hint of parallel tracks, as if ofrunners. This was what made us pause again.

It was during that pause that we caught—simultaneously this time—theother odour ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a more frightful odour—lessfrightful intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this place under the known circ*mstances . . .unless, of course, Gedney. . . . For the odour was the plain and familiar oneof common petrol—every-day gasoline.

Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We knewnow that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled into this nighted burial-placeof the aeons, hence could not doubt any longer the existence of nameless conditions—presentor at least recent—just ahead. Yet in the end we did let sheer burning curiosity—oranxiety—or auto-hypnotism—or vague thoughts of responsibility toward Gedney—orwhat not—drive us on. Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen atthe alley-turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical piping—potentially of tremendoussignificance in the light of Lake’s dissection report despite its close resemblance tothe cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks—which he thought he had shortly afterward halfheard from unknown depths below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left—ofwhat had disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivable—awild 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 filteredupper 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 impressionwe could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met oureyes 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 basem*ntout of which the abyssward aperture opened.

The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carven walls of the blocked corridorin which we stood, shewed several doorways in various states of obstruction; and from one ofthem the gasoline odour—quite submerging that other hint of odour—came with especialdistinctness. As we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a slightand recent clearing away of debris from that particular opening. Whatever the lurking horrormight be, we believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly manifest. I do not think anyonewill 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 wasone of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured crypt—a perfectcube with sides of about twenty feet—there remained no recent object of instantly discerniblesize; 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 beendisturbed; and we turned on both torches full strength. Though what we saw in that light wasactually simple and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because of what itimplied. It was a rough levelling of the debris, upon which several small objects lay carelesslyscattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount of gasoline must have been spilledlately enough to leave a strong odour even at this extreme super-plateau altitude. In otherwords, it could not be other than a sort of camp—a camp made by questing beings who likeus 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 seenat 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, someoddly 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 wasall bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on them we felt wehad come to the worst. We had found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which mighthave prepared us, yet the effect of the sight down there in the pre-human vaults of a nightmarecity was almost too much to bear.

A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those foundon the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave-mounds mighthave been made; and he might conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches—varying intheir accuracy or lack of it—which outlined the neighbouring parts of the city and tracedthe way from a circularly represented place outside our previous route—a place we identifiedas a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aërialsurvey—to the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel-mouth therein. He might, Irepeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite obviously compiled as ourown had been from late sculptures somewhere in the glacial labyrinth, though not from the oneswhich we had seen and used. But what this art-blind bungler could never have done was to executethose 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 unmistakabletechnique 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 forour lives after that; since our conclusions were now—notwithstanding their wildness—completelyfixed, 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—inthe men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits.Half-paralysed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazingflame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.

Of course we did not mean to face that—or those—which we knew hadbeen there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this time have found theother neighbouring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within to whatever night-black fragmentsof 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 ournew emotions took—just what change of immediate objective it was that so sharpened oursense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what we feared—yet I will not denythat 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 interposeda new goal in the form of that great circular place shewn on the crumpled sketches we had found.We had at once recognised it as a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in the very earliestcarvings, but appearing only as a prodigious round aperture from above. Something about theimpressiveness of its rendering, even in these hasty diagrams, made us think that its sub-glaciallevels must still form a feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvelsas yet unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible age according to the sculptures inwhich 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 linkwith the upper world—a shorter route than the one we were so carefully blazing, and probablythat by which those others had descended.

At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches—whichquite perfectly confirmed our own—and start back over the indicated course to the circularplace; the course which our nameless predecessors must have traversed twice before us. The otherneighbouring gate to the abyss would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our journey—duringwhich we continued to leave an economical trail of paper—for it was precisely the samein kind as that by which we had reached the cul de sac; except that it tended to adhere moreclosely to the ground level and even descend to basem*nt corridors. Every now and then we couldtrace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter under foot; and after we had passed outsidethe radius of the gasoline scent we were again faintly conscious—spasmodically—ofthat more hideous and more persistent scent. After the way had branched from our former coursewe sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls; noting in almostevery case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which indeed seem to have formed a main aestheticoutlet for the Old Ones.

About 9:30 P.M., while traversing a vaulted corridor whose increasingly glaciatedfloor seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we beganto see strong daylight ahead and were able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were comingto 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 seemuch through it even before we emerged. Beyond there stretched a prodigious round space—fully200 feet in diameter—strown with debris and containing many choked archways correspondingto the one we were about to cross. The walls were—in available spaces—boldly sculpturedinto a spiral band of heroic proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weatheringcaused by the openness of the spot, an artistic splendour far beyond anything we had encounteredbefore. The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated, and we fancied that the true bottomlay at a considerably lower depth.

But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which, eludingthe archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally up the stupendous cylindricalwall like an inside counterpart of those once climbing outside the monstrous towers or zigguratsof antique Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight, and the perspective which confounded thedescent with the tower’s inner wall, had prevented our noticing this feature from theair, and thus caused us to seek another avenue to the sub-glacial level. Pabodie might havebeen able to tell what sort of engineering held it in place, but Danforth and I could merelyadmire and marvel. We could see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there, but what wesaw seemed inadequate to the function performed. The thing was excellently preserved up to thepresent top of the tower—a highly remarkable circ*mstance in view of its exposure—andits 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—fiftymillion years old, and without doubt the most primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes—wesaw that the ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet. This,we recalled from our aërial survey, meant an outside glaciation of some forty feet; sincethe yawning gulf we had seen from the plane had been at the top of an approximately twenty-footmound of crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths of its circumference by themassive curving walls of a line of higher ruins. According to the sculptures the original towerhad stood in the centre of an immense circular plaza; and had been perhaps 500 or 600 feet high,with tiers of horizontal discs near the top, and a row of needle-like spires along the upperrim. Most of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward—a fortunatehappening, since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and the whole interior choked.As it was, the ramp shewed sad battering; whilst the choking was such that all the archwaysat the bottom seemed to have been recently half-cleared.

It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by whichthose others had descended, and that this would be the logical route for our own ascent despitethe long trail of paper we had left elsewhere. The tower’s mouth was no farther from thefoothills and our waiting plane than was the great terraced building we had entered, and anyfurther sub-glacial 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 andguessed. Then as we picked our way cautiously over the debris of the great floor, there camea sight which for the time excluded all other matters.

It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of theramp’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 hardusage which must have included forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry anddebris, as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully andintelligently packed and strapped, and contained things memorably familiar enough—thegasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging withbooks, and some bulging with less obvious contents—everything derived from Lake’sequipment. After what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared for thisencounter. The really great shock came when we stepped over and undid one tarpaulin whose outlineshad peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others as well as Lake had been interested in collectingtypical specimens; for there were two here, both stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved, patchedwith adhesive plaster where some wounds around the neck had occurred, and wrapped with patentcare to prevent further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog.

X.

Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking about the northward tunneland the abyss so soon after our sombre discovery, and I am not prepared to say that we wouldhave immediately revived such thoughts but for a specific circ*mstance which broke in upon usand set up a whole new train of speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedneyand were standing in a kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our consciousness—thefirst sounds we had heard since descending out of the open where the mountain wind whined faintlyfrom its unearthly heights. Well known and mundane though they were, their presence in thisremote world of death was more unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tonescould possibly have been—since they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmicharmony.

Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range whichLake’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 thecamp horror—it would have had a kind of hellish congruity with the aeon-dead region aroundus. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As it was, however, thenoise shattered all our profoundly seated adjustments—all our tacit acceptance of theinner antarctic as a waste as utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life asthe sterile disc of the moon. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemyof elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrousresponse. Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarised by oursea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think ofit here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief—it was simply the raucous squawkingof a penguin.

The muffled sound floated from sub-glacial recesses nearly opposite to thecorridor whence we had come—regions manifestly in the direction of that other tunnel tothe vast abyss. The presence of a living water-bird in such a direction—in a world whosesurface 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 archwayfrom which much debris had been cleared; resuming our trail-blazing—with an added paper-supplytaken with curious repugnance from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledges—when weleft daylight behind.

As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discernedsome curious dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a sort whose descriptionwould be only too superfluous. The course indicated by the penguin cries was precisely whatour map and compass prescribed as an approach to the more northerly tunnel-mouth, and we wereglad to find that a bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basem*nt levels seemed open. Thetunnel, according to the chart, ought to start from the basem*nt of a large pyramidal structurewhich we seemed vaguely to recall from our aërial survey as remarkably well preserved.Along our path the single torch shewed a customary profusion of carvings, but we did not pauseto examine any of these.

Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the secondtorch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier fears of what mightlurk near. Those other ones, having left their supplies in the great circular place, must haveplanned to return after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discardedall caution concerning them as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddlingthing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realise at once that it was not one of thoseothers. They were larger and dark, and according to the sculptures their motion over land surfaceswas a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment. Butto say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutchedfor an instant by a primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regardingthose others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral archwayto our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones. For it wasonly a penguin—albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the knownking penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.

When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torcheson the indifferent and unheeding group of three we saw that they were all eyeless albinos ofthe same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguinsdepicted in the Old Ones’ sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that theywere descended from the same stock—undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmerinner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied theireyes to mere useless slits. That their present habitat was the vast abyss we sought, was notfor a moment to be doubted; and this evidence of the gulf’s continued warmth and habitabilityfilled us with the most curious and subtly perturbing fancies.

We wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of theirusual domain. The state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that it had at no timebeen an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest indifference of the trio to our presencemade it seem odd that any passing party of those others should have startled them. Was it possiblethat those others had taken some aggressive action or tried to increase their meat supply? Wedoubted whether that pungent odour which the dogs had hated could cause an equal antipathy inthese penguins; since their ancestors had obviously lived on excellent terms with the Old Ones—anamicable relationship which must have survived in the abyss below as long as any of the OldOnes remained. Regretting—in a flareup of the old spirit of pure science—that wecould not photograph these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them to their squawking andpushed on toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively proved to us, and whose exactdirection occasional penguin tracks made clear.

Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarlysculptureless 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 endedin a prodigious open space which made us gasp involuntarily—a perfect inverted hemisphere,obviously deep underground; fully an hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with lowarchways opening around all parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning cavernouslywith a black arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the vault to a height of nearly fifteenfeet. It was the entrance to the great abyss.

In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively though decadentlycarved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, a few albino penguins waddled—aliensthere, but indifferent and unseeing. The black tunnel yawned indefinitely off at a steep descendinggrade, its aperture adorned with grotesquely chiselled jambs and lintel. From that crypticalmouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air and perhaps even a suspicion of vapour proceeded;and we wondered what living entities other than penguins the limitless void below, and the contiguoushoneycombings of the land and the titan mountains, might conceal. We wondered, too, whetherthe trace of mountain-top smoke at first suspected by poor Lake, as well as the odd haze wehad ourselves perceived around the rampart-crowned peak, might not be caused by the tortuous-channelledrising of some such vapour from the unfathomed regions of earth’s core.

Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was—at least at the start—aboutfifteen 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, decadentstyle; and all the construction and carving were marvellously well preserved. The floor wasquite clear, except for a slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracksof those others. The farther one advanced, the warmer it became; so that we were soon unbuttoningour 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 gaveplace to solid rock, though the tunnel kept the same proportions and presented the same aspectof carved regularity. Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that grooves were cut inthe floor. Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in ourdiagrams; none of them such as to complicate the problem of our return, and all of them welcomeas possible refuges in case we met unwelcome entities on their way back from the abyss. Thenameless scent of such things was very distinct. Doubtless it was suicidally foolish to ventureinto that tunnel under the known conditions, but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certainpersons than most suspect—indeed, it was just such a lure which had brought us to thisunearthly polar waste in the first place. We saw several penguins as we passed along, and speculatedon the distance we would have to traverse. The carvings had led us to expect a steep downhillwalk of about a mile to the abyss, but our previous wanderings had shewn us that matters ofscale 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 visiblevapour as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air. Thetemperature was rapidly ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a careless heap ofmaterial shudderingly familiar to us. It was composed of furs and tent-cloth taken from Lake’scamp, 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 havebeen reached. The nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another and scarcely less offensiveodour—of what nature we could not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and perhapsunknown subterrene fungi. Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the carvingshad not prepared us—a broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-looking elliptical cavernwith a level floor; some 75 feet long and 50 broad, and with many immense side-passages leadingaway into cryptical darkness.

Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torchessuggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several walls between adjacenthoneycombings. The walls were rough, and the high vaulted roof was thick with stalactites; butthe solid rock floor had been smoothed off, and was free from all debris, detritus, or evendust to a positively abnormal extent. Except for the avenue through which we had come, thiswas true of the floors of all the great galleries opening off from it; and the singularity ofthe condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling. The curious new foetor which had supplementedthe nameless scent was excessively pungent here; so much so that it destroyed all trace of theother. Something about this whole place, with its polished and almost glistening floor, struckus as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any of the monstrous things we had previouslyencountered.

The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the larger proportionof penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion as to the right course amidst this plethoraof equally great cave-mouths. Nevertheless we resolved to resume our paper trail-blazing ifany 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—andstopped short in amazement at the supremely radical change which had come over the carvingsin this part of the passage. We realised, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones’sculpture at the time of the tunnelling; and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship ofthe 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 natureas well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skillthat 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 delicacyof detail. It was counter-sunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the same general lineas the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections, but the height of the reliefs did not reachthe level of the general surface. Danforth had the idea that it was a second carving—asort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In nature it was whollydecorative and conventional; and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following thequintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seeming more like a parody than a perpetuationof that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but profoundly alienelement had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique—an alien element,Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution. It was like,yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognise as the Old Ones’ art; and I waspersistently reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned inthe Roman manner. That others had recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presenceof a used torch battery on the floor in front of one of the most characteristic designs.

Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we resumedour advance after a cursory look; though frequently casting beams over the walls to see if anyfurther decorative changes developed. Nothing of the sort was perceived, though the carvingswere 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 distantchorus of them somewhere deep within the earth. The new and inexplicable odour was abominablystrong, and we could detect scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapourahead bespoke increasing contrasts in temperature, and the relative nearness of the sunlesssea-cliffs of the great abyss. Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on thepolished floor ahead—obstructions which were quite definitely not penguins—and turnedon 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 tobe hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeplyto permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires allthe 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 intensificationof the strange prevailing foetor, now quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench of thoseothers which had gone before us. The light of the second torch left no doubt of what the obstructionswere, and we dared approach them only because we could see, even from a distance, that theywere quite as past all harming power as had been the six similar specimens unearthed from themonstrous star-mounded graves at poor Lake’s camp.

They were, indeed, as lacking in completeness as most of those we had unearthed—thoughit grew plain from the thick, dark-green pool gathering around them that their incompletenesswas of infinitely greater recency. There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake’sbulletins 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 strugglehad occurred down here in the dark.

Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks; and ourears now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those others disturbed sucha place and aroused murderous pursuit? The obstructions did not suggest it, for penguin beaksagainst the tough tissues Lake had dissected could hardly account for the terrible damage ourapproaching glance was beginning to make out. Besides, the huge blind birds we had seen appearedto be singularly peaceful.

Had there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent fourresponsible? If so, where were they? Were they close at hand and likely to form an immediatemenace to us? We glanced anxiously at some of the smooth-floored lateral passages as we continuedour slow and frankly reluctant approach. Whatever the conflict was, it had clearly been thatwhich had frightened the penguins into their unaccustomed wandering. It must, then, have arisennear that faintly heard rookery in the incalculable gulf beyond, since there were no signs thatany 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 finishedthem. One could picture the daemoniac fray between namelessly monstrous entities as it surgedout of the black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins squawking and scurrying ahead.

I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowlyand reluctantly. Would to heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at topspeed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate muralsaping and mocking the things they had superseded—run back, before we had seen what wedid see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easilyagain!

Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon realisedthe dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed, twisted, and ruptured as theywere, their chief common injury was total decapitation. From each one the tentacled starfish-headhad been removed; and as we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like somehellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage. Their noisome dark-greenichor formed a large, spreading pool; but its stench was half overshadowed by that newer andstranger stench, here more pungent than at any other point along our route. Only when we hadcome very close to the sprawling obstructions could we trace that second, unexplainable foetorto any immediate source—and the instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vividsculptures of the Old Ones’ history in the Permian age 150 million years ago, gave ventto a nerve-tortured cry which echoed hysterically through that vaulted and archaic passage withthe evil palimpsest carvings.

I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those primalsculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had suggested thathideous slime-coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate Old Ones—those whom thefrightful shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness in thegreat war of re-subjugation. 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 portrayedby any beings. The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that nonehad been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had ever conceived them. Formlessprotoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinationsof bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slavesof suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, moreand more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemousOld Ones willing to use and to carve such things?

And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescentblack slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new unknownodour whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage—clung to those bodies and sparkledless voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly re-sculptured wall in a series of groupeddots —we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was notfear of those four missing others—for all too well did we suspect they would do no harmagain. Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men ofanother age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them—as itwill on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in thathideously dead or sleeping polar waste—and this was their tragic homecoming.

They had not been even savages—for what indeed had they done? That awfulawakening in the cold of an unknown epoch—perhaps an attack by the furry, franticallybarking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians withthe 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 donein their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, justas 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 worshippedand roamed among the tree-ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse, andhad read its carven latter days as we had done. They had tried to reach their living fellowsin fabled depths of blackness they had never seen—and what had they found? All this flashedin unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coatedshapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot-groups of fresh slime onthe wall beside them—looked and understood what must have triumphed and survived downthere in the Cyclopean water-city of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now asinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth’s hystericalscream.

The shock of recognising that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen usinto mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that we have learnedof 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 mistcurled forward as if veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulk—and then came a soundwhich upset much of what we had just decided, and in so doing broke the spell and enabled usto run like mad past squawking, confused penguins over our former trail back to the city, alongice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp ina 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; becauseit was what poor Lake’s dissection had led us to attribute to those we had just judgeddead. It was, Danforth later told me, precisely what he had caught in infinitely muffled formwhen at that spot beyond the alley-corner above the glacial level; and it certainly had a shockingresemblance to the wind-pipings we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves. At the riskof seeming puerile I will add another thing, too; if only because of the surprising way Danforth’simpression 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 whichPoe may have had access when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will beremembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigioussignificance connected with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic, spectrallysnowy 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 advancingwhite mist—that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.

We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered, thoughwe knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused and pursuing survivorof the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really wished to do so. We had a vague hope,however, that non-aggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason might cause such a beingto spare us in case of capture; if only from scientific curiosity. After all, if such an onehad nothing to fear for itself it would have no motive in harming us. Concealment being futileat this juncture, we used our torch for a running glance behind, and perceived that the mistwas thinning. Would we see, at last, a complete and living specimen of those others? Again camethat insidious musical piping— “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Then, noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer, it occurred to usthat the entity might be wounded. We could take no chances, however, since it was very obviouslyapproaching 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 andless mentionable nightmare—that foetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasmwhose race had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to re-carve and squirm through theburrows of the hills—we could form no guess; and it cost us a genuine pang to leave thisprobably crippled Old One—perhaps a lone survivor—to the peril of recapture anda 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 squawkingand screaming and displaying signs of a panic really surprising in view of their relativelyminor 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 onencountering the bodies of its fallen kindred and the hellish slime inscription above them.We could never know what that daemon message was—but those burials at Lake’s camphad shewn how much importance the beings attached to their dead. Our recklessly used torch nowrevealed ahead of us the large open cavern where various ways converged, and we were glad tobe leaving those morbid palimpsest sculptures—almost felt even when scarcely seen—behind.

Another thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility oflosing our pursuer at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were several of the blindalbino penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear that their fear of the oncoming entitywas extreme to the point of unaccountability. If at that point we dimmed our torch to the verylowest limit of travelling need, keeping it strictly in front of us, the frightened squawkingmotions of the huge birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our true course, andsomehow set up a false lead. Amidst the churning, spiralling fog the littered and unglisteningfloor 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, forthose indicated special senses which made the Old Ones partly though imperfectly independentof light in emergencies. In fact, we were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselvesin our haste. For we had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; sincethe consequences of loss in those unknown foothill honeycombings would be unthinkable.

The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing didtake a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The penguins alone couldnot have saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they seem to have done so. Only a benignfate kept the curling vapours thick enough at the right moment, for they were constantly shiftingand threatening to vanish. Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we emerged from thenauseously re-sculptured tunnel into the cave; so that we actually caught one first and onlyhalf-glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final, desperately fearful glance backwardbefore dimming the torch and mixing with the penguins in the hope of dodging pursuit. If thefate which screened us was benign, that which gave us the half-glimpse was infinitely the opposite;for to that flash of semi-vision can be traced a full half of the horror which has ever sincehaunted us.

Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the immemorialinstinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its pursuer; or perhaps it was anautomatic attempt to answer a subconscious question raised by one of our senses. In the midstof our flight, with all our faculties centred on the problem of escape, we were in no conditionto observe and analyse details; yet even so our latent brain-cells must have wondered at themessage brought them by our nostrils. Afterward we realised what it was—that our retreatfrom the foetid slime-coating on those headless obstructions, and the coincident approach ofthe pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of stenches which logic called for. Inthe neighbourhood of the prostrate things that new and lately unexplainable foetor had beenwholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely given place to the nameless stenchassociated with those others. This it had not done—for instead, the newer and less bearablesmell was now virtually undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent each second.

So we glanced back—simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt theincipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we flashed both torchesfull strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from sheer primitive anxiety to see allwe could, or in a less primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity beforewe dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth-centre ahead. Unhappy act!Not Orpheus himself, or Lot’s wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance. And againcame that shocking, wide-ranged piping— “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

I might as well be frank—even if I cannot bear to be quite direct—instating what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to eachother. 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 ourtorches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone musthave carried us through—perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that waswhat saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left. Danforthwas totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the journey was hearinghim light-headedly chant an hysterical formula in which I alone of mankind could have foundanything but insane irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of thepenguins; reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and—thank God—through the nowempty vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at once—else we would not have beenalive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a shade of difference in his nervous reactionsmight 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 burrowedthrough our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritualhad neither irrelevance nor home-feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly themonstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it. We had expected, upon looking back, to seea terrible and incredibly moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity wehad formed a clear idea. What we did see—for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned—wassomething 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 froma station platform—the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneousdistance, constellated with strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as apiston fills a cylinder.

But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmareplastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus;gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour.It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeriesof protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming andunforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down uponus, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kindhad swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry— “Tekeli-li!Tekeli-li!” And at last we remembered that the daemoniac shoggoths—given life,thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save thatwhich the dot-groups expressed— had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of theirbygone masters.

XII.

Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured hemisphere and of threadingour back trail through the Cyclopean rooms and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purelydream-fragments involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was as ifwe floated in a nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or orientation. The greyhalf-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; but we did not go near those cachedsledges 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 theterrible fatigue and short breath which our race through the thin plateau air had produced;but not even the fear of collapse could make us pause before reaching the normal outer realmof sun and sky. There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from those buriedepochs; for as we wound our panting way up the sixty-foot cylinder of primal masonry we glimpsedbeside us a continuous procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race’s early and undecayedtechnique—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 tumbledblocks; with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward, and the brooding peaks ofthe great mountains shewing beyond the more crumbled structures toward the east. The low antarcticsun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, andthe terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast withsuch relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape. The skyabove was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapours, and the cold clutched at ourvitals. Wearily resting the outfit-bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout our desperateflight, we rebuttoned our heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walkthrough the aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our aëroplane waited. Of what hadset us fleeing from the darkness of earth’s secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing atall.

In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the foothills—theprobable ancient terrace—by which we had descended, and could see the dark bulk of ourgreat plane amidst the sparse ruins on the rising slope ahead. Half way uphill toward our goalwe paused for a momentary breathing-spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic palaeogeantangle of incredible stone shapes below us—once more outlined mystically against an unknownwest. As we did so we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning haziness; the restless ice-vapourshaving moved up to the zenith, where their mocking outlines seemed on the point of settlinginto some bizarre pattern which they feared to make quite definite or conclusive.

There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque citya dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights loomed dream-like againstthe beckoning rose-colour of the western sky. Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancienttable-land, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon ofshadow. For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene’s unearthly cosmic beauty, andthen vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line could be nothing elsethan the terrible mountains of the forbidden land—highest of earth’s peaks and focusof earth’s evil; harbourers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets; shunned and prayedto by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living thing of earth, but visitedby the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the plains in the polar night—beyonddoubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng,whereof unholy primal legends hint evasively. We were the first human beings ever to see them—andI hope to God we may be the last.

If the sculptured maps and pictures in that pre-human city had told truly,these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than 300 miles away; yet none the lesssharply did their dim elfin essence jut above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edgeof a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then, musthave been tremendous beyond all known comparison—carrying them up into tenuous atmosphericstrata peopled by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of afterunexplainable falls. Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of whatthe great bygone river had washed down into the city from their accursed slopes—and wonderedhow much sense and how much folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them soreticently. 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 thana thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpseof what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed a measure of myoverwrought 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 planeour fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast enough range whose re-crossing lay aheadof us. From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously againstthe east, again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and whenwe thought of the damnable honeycombs inside them, and of the frightful amorphous entities thatmight have pushed their foetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we couldnot face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave-mouthswhere 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 havedone when he made that early mistake about volcanism—and thought shiveringly of that kindredmist from which we had just escaped; of that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering abysswhence all such vapours 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 takeoff over thenightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry spread out as it had done when first wesaw it—so short, yet infinitely long, a time ago—and we began rising and turningto test the wind for our crossing through the pass. At a very high level there must have beengreat disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantasticthings; but at 24,000 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 though I was,I thought at that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerouscrossing between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over his dutieshe did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared atthe sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the pass—resolutely refusing topay attention to the puffs of mountain-top vapour, and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears likeUlysses’ men off the Sirens’ coast to keep that disturbing wind-piping from my consciousness.

But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervouspitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at theterrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleaksea of snowy, rampart-strown 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 broughtus so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplesslywith the controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossingsafely—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 screamout so insanely—a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his presentbreakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind’s piping and the engine’sbuzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, butthat had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmarecity. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly—andI 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, thatsome of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalitieswake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of theirblack lairs to newer and wider conquests.

All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. Itwas not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of echoing, vaporous, wormilyhoneycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, daemoniac glimpse,among the churning zenith-clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountainswhich the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusionborn of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognised mirageof the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake’s camp the day before; but it wasso 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 proto-shoggoths”,“the windowless solids with five dimensions”, “the nameless cylinder”,“the elder pharos”, “Yog-Sothoth”, “the primal white jelly”,“the colour out of space”, “the wings”, “the eyes in darkness”,“the moon-ladder”, “the original, the eternal, the undying”, and otherbizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it tohis curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among thefew who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomiconkept under lock and key in the college library.

The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbedenough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that its swirls of ice-dustmay have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimesbe reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud, might easily have suppliedthe rest—and of course Danforth did not hint any of those specific horrors till afterhis memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so muchin one instantaneous glance.

At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad wordof all too obvious source:

“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”

Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said tohave flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He visited the ruins ofBabylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southerndesert of Arabia—the Roba el Khaliyeh or “Empty Space” of the ancients—and“Dahna” or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabitedby protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievablemarvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt inDamascus, where the Necronomicon ( Al Azif ) was written, and of his final death ordisappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told. He is said by EbnKhallikan (12th cent. biographer) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight anddevoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things aretold. He claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath theruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older thanmankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he calledYog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.

In A.D. 950 the Azif, which had gained a considerable tho’surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age, was secretly translated into Greekby Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople under the title Necronomicon. For a century itimpelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts, when it was suppressed and burnt by thepatriarch Michael. After this it is only heard of furtively, but (1228) Olaus Wormius made a Latintranslation later in the Middle Ages, and the Latin text was printed twice—once in thefifteenth century in black-letter (evidently in Germany) and once in the seventeenth (prob.Spanish)—both editions being without identifying marks, and located as to time and place byinternal typographical evidence only. The work both Latin and Greek was banned by Pope Gregory IXin 1232, shortly after its Latin translation, which called attention to it. The Arabic original waslost as early as Wormius’ time, as indicated by his prefatory note; and no sight of the Greekcopy—which was printed in Italy between 1500 and 1550—has been reported since the burningof a certain Salem man’s library in 1692. An English translation made by Dr. Dee was neverprinted, and exists only in fragments recovered from the original manuscript. Of the Latin textsnow existing one (15th cent.) is known to be in the British Museum under lock and key, whileanother (17th cent.) is in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. A seventeenth-century editionis in the Widener Library at Harvard, and in the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham. Alsoin the library of the University of Buenos Ayres. Numerous other copies probably exist in secret,and a fifteenth-century one is persistently rumoured to form part of the collection of a celebratedAmerican millionaire. A still vaguer rumour credits the preservation of a sixteenth-century Greektext in the Salem family of Pickman; but if it was so preserved, it vanished with the artist R.U.Pickman, who disappeared early in 1926. The book is rigidly suppressed by the authorities of mostcountries, and by all branches of organised ecclesiasticism. Reading leads to terribleconsequences. It was from rumours of this book (of which relatively few of the general publicknow) that R.W. Chambers is said to have derived the idea of his early novel The King inYellow.

Chronology

Al Azif written circa 730 A.D. at Damascus by Abdul Alhazred Tr. to Greek 950 A.D. asNecronomicon by Theodorus Philetas Burnt by Patriarch Michael 1050 (i.e., Greek text).Arabic text now lost. Olaus translates Gr. to Latin 1228 1232 Latin ed. (and Gr.) suppr. byPope Gregory IX 14… Black-letter printed edition (Germany) 15… Gr. text printed inItaly 16… Spanish reprint of Latin text

I. A Result and a Prologue

From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared anexceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward, and was placed underrestraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched his aberration grow from a mereeccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a profoundand peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind. Doctors confess themselves quite baffledby his case, since it presented oddities of a general physiological as well as psychologicalcharacter.

In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years wouldwarrant. Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of this young man hadtaken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquire. In the second place, his organicprocesses shewed a certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical experience canparallel. Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so thatno sounds above a whisper were possible; digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimised, andneural 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 structureof the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on theright hip had disappeared, whilst there had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole or blackishspot of which no trace existed before. In general, all physicians agree that in Ward the processesof metabolism had become retarded to a degree beyond precedent.

Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no affinity to anysort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was conjoined to a mentalforce which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange andgrotesque forms. Dr. Willett, who was Ward’s family physician, affirms that thepatient’s gross mental capacity, as gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere ofhis insanity, had actually increased since the seizure. Ward, it is true, was always a scholar andan antiquarian; but even his most brilliant early work did not shew the prodigious grasp andinsight displayed during his last examinations by the alienists. It was, indeed, a difficult matterto obtain a legal commitment to the hospital, so powerful and lucid did the youth’s mindseem; and only on the evidence of others, and on the strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock ofinformation as distinguished from his intelligence, was he finally placed in confinement. To thevery moment of his vanishment he was an omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as hispoor voice permitted; and shrewd observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely predicted that hewould not be long in gaining his discharge from custody.

Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched hisgrowth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom. He hadhad a terrible experience and had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to hissceptical colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own in his connexion withthe case. He was the last to see the patient before his flight, and emerged from that finalconversation in a state of mixed horror and relief which several recalled when Ward’s escapebecame 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, yetafter that talk with Willett the youth was undeniably gone. Willett himself has no publicexplanations 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 believehim. 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 achill April breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-grey dust that almost choked them. True, thedogs howled some time before; but that was while Willett was still present, and they had caughtnothing 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 hadbeen talking with him, and both disavowed any knowledge or complicity in the escape. Only fromcertain closely confidential friends of Willett and the senior Ward have any clues been gained, andeven these are too wildly fantastic for general credence. The one fact which remains is that up tothe present time no trace of the missing madman has been unearthed.

Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his taste from thevenerable town around him, and from the relics of the past which filled every corner of hisparents’ old mansion in Prospect Street on the crest of the hill. With the years his devotionto 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. Thesetastes are important to remember in considering his madness; for although they do not form itsabsolute nucleus, they play a prominent part in its superficial form. The gaps of information whichthe alienists noticed were all related to modern matters, and were invariably offset by acorrespondingly excessive though outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought out byadroit questioning; so that one would have fancied the patient literally transferred to a formerage through some obscure sort of auto-hypnosis. The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longerinterested in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his regard for them throughsheer familiarity; and all his final efforts were obviously bent toward mastering those commonfacts of the modern world which had been so totally and unmistakably expunged from his brain. Thatthis wholesale deletion had occurred, he did his best to hide; but it was clear to all who watchedhim that his whole programme of reading and conversation was determined by a frantic wish to imbibesuch knowledge of his own life and of the ordinary practical and cultural background of thetwentieth century as ought to have been his by virtue of his birth in 1902 and his education in theschools of our own time. Alienists are now wondering how, in view of his vitally impaired range ofdata, the escaped patient manages to cope with the complicated world of today; the dominant opinionbeing that he is ‘lying low’ in some humble and unexacting position till his stock ofmodern 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 atthe Moses Brown School, when he suddenly turned from the study of the past to the study of theoccult, and refused to qualify for college on the ground that he had individual researches of muchgreater 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 certaingrave dug in 1771; the grave of an ancestor named Joseph Curwen, some of whose papers he professedto 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 thewinter of 1919-20 saw a great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly stopped his generalantiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult subjects both at home andabroad, varied only by this strangely persistent search for his forefather’s grave.

From this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially dissents; basing his verdicton his close and continuous knowledge of the patient, and on certain frightful investigations anddiscoveries which he made toward the last. Those investigations and discoveries have left theirmark upon him; so that his voice trembles when he tells them, and his hand trembles when he triesto write of them. Willett admits that the change of 1919-20 would ordinarily appear to markthe beginning of a progressive decadence which culminated in the horrible and uncanny alienation of1928; but believes from personal observation that a finer distinction must be made. Granting freelythat the boy was always ill-balanced temperamentally, and prone to be unduly susceptible andenthusiastic in his responses to phenomena around him, he refuses to concede that the earlyalteration marked the actual passage from sanity to madness; crediting instead Ward’s ownstatement that he had discovered or rediscovered something whose effect on human thought was likelyto be marvellous and profound. The true madness, he is certain, came with a later change; after theCurwen portrait and the ancient papers had been unearthed; after a trip to strange foreign placeshad been made, and some terrible invocations chanted under strange and secret circ*mstances; aftercertain answers to these invocations had been plainly indicated, and a frantic letter pennedunder agonising and inexplicable conditions; after the wave of vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxetgossip; and after the patient’s memory commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst hisvoice failed and his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many subsequentlynoticed.

It was only about this time, Willett points out with much acuteness, that thenightmare qualities became indubitably linked with Ward; and the doctor feels shudderingly surethat enough solid evidence exists to sustain the youth’s claim regarding his crucialdiscovery. In the first place, two workmen of high intelligence saw Joseph Curwen’s ancientpapers found. Secondly, the boy once shewed Dr. Willett those papers and a page of the Curwendiary, and each of the documents had every appearance of genuineness. The hole where Ward claimedto have found them was long a visible reality, and Willett had a very convincing final glimpse ofthem in surroundings which can scarcely be believed and can never perhaps be proved. Then therewere the mysteries and coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters, and the problem of theCurwen penmanship and of what the detectives brought to light about Dr. Allen; these things, andthe terrible message in mediaeval minuscules found in Willett’s pocket when he gainedconsciousness after his shocking experience.

And most conclusive of all, there are the two hideous results which thedoctor obtained from a certain pair of formulae during his final investigations; results whichvirtually proved the authenticity of the papers and of their monstrous implications at the sametime that those papers were borne forever from human knowledge.

One must look back at Charles Ward’s earlier life as at something belongingas much to the past as the antiquities he loved so keenly. In the autumn of 1918, and with aconsiderable show of zest in the military training of the period, he had begun his junior year atthe Moses Brown School, which lies very near his home. The old main building, erected in 1819, hadalways charmed his youthful antiquarian sense; and the spacious park in which the academy is setappealed to his sharp eye for landscape. His social activities were few; and his hours were spentmainly at home, in rambling walks, in his classes and drills, and in pursuit of antiquarian andgenealogical data at the City Hall, the State House, the Public Library, the Athenaeum, theHistorical Society, the John Carter Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the newlyopened 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 adominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.

His walks were always adventures in antiquity, during which he managed torecapture from the myriad relics of a glamorous old city a vivid and connected picture of thecenturies before. His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous hill thatrises just east of the river; and from the rear windows of its rambling wings he could look dizzilyout over all the clustered spires, domes, roofs, and skyscraper summits of the lower town to thepurple hills of the countryside beyond. Here he was born, and from the lovely classic porch of thedouble-bayed brick facade his nurse had first wheeled him in his carriage; past the little whitefarmhouse of two hundred years before that the town had long ago overtaken, and on toward thestately colleges along the shady, sumptuous street, whose old square brick mansions and smallerwooden houses with narrow, heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst theirgenerous yards and gardens.

He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower down on thesteep hill, and with all its eastern homes on high terraces. The small wooden houses averaged agreater age here, for it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed; and in these rides hehad imbibed something of the colour of a quaint colonial village. The nurse used to stop and sit onthe benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with policemen; and one of the child’s first memorieswas of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw onewinter 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 theState House stood out in massive silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break inone of the tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky.

When he was larger his famous walks began; first with his impatiently draggednurse, and then alone in dreamy meditation. Farther and farther down that almost perpendicular hillhe would venture, each time reaching older and quainter levels of the ancient city. He wouldhesitate gingerly down vertical Jenckes Street with its bank walls and colonial gables to the shadyBenefit Street corner, where before him was a wooden antique with an Ionic-pilastered pair ofdoorways, and beside him a prehistoric gambrel-roofer with a bit of primal farmyard remaining, andthe great Judge Durfee house with its fallen vestiges of Georgian grandeur. It was getting to be aslum here; but the titan elms cast a restoring shadow over the place, and the boy used to strollsouth past the long lines of the pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys andclassic portals. On the eastern side they were set high over basem*nts with railed double flightsof stone steps, and the young Charles could picture them as they were when the street was new, andred heels and periwigs set off the painted pediments whose signs of wear were now becoming sovisible.

Westward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above, down to the old “TownStreet” that the founders had laid out at the river’s edge in 1636. Here raninnumerable little lanes with leaning, huddled houses of immense antiquity; and fascinated thoughhe was, it was long before he dared to thread their archaic verticality for fear they would turnout a dream or a gateway to unknown terrors. He found it much less formidable to continue alongBenefit Street past the iron fence of St. John’s hidden churchyard and the rear of the 1761Colony House and the mouldering bulk of the Golden Ball Inn where Washington stopped. At MeetingStreet—the successive Gaol Lane and King Street of other periods—he would look upwardto the east and see the arched flight of steps to which the highway had to resort in climbing theslope, and downward to the west, glimpsing the old brick colonial schoolhouse that smiles acrossthe road at the ancient Sign of Shakespear’s Head where the Providence Gazette andCountry-Journal was printed before the Revolution. Then came the exquisite First Baptist Churchof 1775, luxurious with its matchless Gibbs steeple, and the Georgian roofs and cupolas hoveringby. Here and to the southward the neighbourhood became better, flowering at last into a marvellousgroup 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 wickedold waterfront 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 downinto 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 dockswhere the bay and sound steamers still touched, and returning northward at this lower level pastthe steep-roofed 1816 warehouses and the broad square at the Great Bridge, where the 1773 MarketHouse still stands firm on its ancient arches. In that square he would pause to drink in thebewildering beauty of the old town as it rises on its eastward bluff, decked with its two Georgianspires and crowned by the vast new Christian Science dome as London is crowned by St. Paul’s.He liked mostly to reach this point in the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight touches theMarket House and the ancient hill roofs and belfries with gold, and throws magic around thedreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen used to ride at anchor. After a long look he would growalmost dizzy with a poet’s love for the sight, and then he would scale the slope homeward inthe dusk past the old white church and up the narrow precipitous ways where yellow gleams wouldbegin to peep out in small-paned windows and through fanlights set high over double flights ofsteps with curious wrought-iron railings.

At other times, and in later years, he would seek for vivid contrasts; spendinghalf a walk in the crumbling colonial regions northwest of his home, where the hill drops to thelower eminence of Stampers’ Hill with its ghetto and negro quarter clustering round the placewhere the Boston stage coach used to start before the Revolution, and the other half in thegracious southerly realm about George, Benevolent, Power, and Williams Streets, where the old slopeholds unchanged the fine estates and bits of walled garden and steep green lane in which so manyfragrant 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 worldfrom Charles Ward’s mind; and illustrate the mental soil upon which fell, in that fatefulwinter 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, CharlesWard’s antiquarianism was free from every trace of the morbid. Graveyards held for him noparticular attraction beyond their quaintness and historic value, and of anything like violence orsavage instinct he was utterly devoid. Then, by insidious degrees, there appeared to develop acurious sequel to one of his genealogical triumphs of the year before; when he had discovered amonghis maternal ancestors a certain very long-lived man named Joseph Curwen, who had come from Salemin March of 1692, and about whom a whispered series of highly peculiar and disquieting storiesclustered.

Ward’s great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in 1785 married a certain“Ann Tillinghast, daughter of Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt. James Tillinghast”, ofwhose paternity the family had preserved no trace. Late in 1918, whilst examining a volume oforiginal town records in manuscript, the young genealogist encountered an entry describing a legalchange of name, by which in 1772 a Mrs. Eliza Curwen, widow of Joseph Curwen, resumed, along withher seven-year-old daughter Ann, her maiden name of Tillinghast; on the ground “that herHusband’s name was become a publick 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 tillso proven as to be wholely past Doubting”. This entry came to light upon the accidentalseparation of two leaves which had been carefully pasted together and treated as one by a labouredrevision of the page numbers.

It was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed discovered a hithertounknown great-great-great-grandfather. The discovery doubly excited him because he had alreadyheard vague reports and seen scattered allusions relating to this person; about whom there remainedso few publicly available records, aside from those becoming public only in modern times, that italmost 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 itwas that the colonial recorders were so anxious to conceal and forget; or to suspect that thedeletion had reasons all too valid.

Before this, Ward had been content to let his romancing about old Joseph Curwenremain 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 whateverhe might find concerning him. In this excited quest he eventually succeeded beyond his highestexpectations; for old letters, diaries, and sheaves of unpublished memoirs in cobwebbed Providencegarrets and elsewhere yielded many illuminating passages which their writers had not thought itworth 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 definitesource of Ward’s undoing, was the matter found in August 1919 behind the panelling of thecrumbling house in Olney Court. It was that, beyond a doubt, which opened up those black vistaswhose 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 avery astonishing, enigmatic, and obscurely horrible individual. He had fled from Salem toProvidence—that universal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting—at thebeginning of the great witchcraft panic; being in fear of accusation because of his solitary waysand queer chemical or alchemical experiments. He was a colourless-looking man of about thirty, andwas soon found qualified to become a freeman of Providence; thereafter buying a home lot just northof 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 alarger 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 mucholder than he had been on his arrival. He engaged in shipping enterprises, purchased wharfa*ge nearMile-End Cove, helped rebuild the Great Bridge in 1713, and in 1723 was one of the founders of theCongregational Church on the hill; but always did he retain the nondescript aspect of a man notgreatly over thirty or thirty-five. As decades mounted up, this singular quality began to excitewide notice; but Curwen always explained it by saying that he came of hardy forefathers, andpracticed a simplicity of living which did not wear him out. How such simplicity could bereconciled with the inexplicable comings and goings of the secretive merchant, and with the queergleaming of his windows at all hours of night, was not very clear to the townsfolk; and they wereprone to assign other reasons for his continued youth and longevity. It was held, for the mostpart, that Curwen’s incessant mixings and boilings of chemicals had much to do with hiscondition. Gossip spoke of the strange substances he brought from London and the Indies on hisships or purchased in Newport, Boston, and New York; and when old Dr. Jabez Bowen came fromRehoboth and opened his apothecary shop across the Great Bridge at the Sign of the Unicorn andMortar, there was ceaseless talk of the drugs, acids, and metals that the taciturn recluseincessantly bought or ordered from him. Acting on the assumption that Curwen possessed a wondrousand secret medical skill, many sufferers of various sorts applied to him for aid; but though heappeared to encourage their belief in a non-committal way, and always gave them odd-colouredpotions in response to their requests, it was observed that his ministrations to others seldomproved 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, thepeople began to whisper more darkly; and to meet more than half way that desire for isolation whichhe had always shewn.

Private letters and diaries of the period reveal, too, a multitude of otherreasons why Joseph Curwen was marvelled at, feared, and finally shunned like a plague. His passionfor 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 thePawtuxet Road he had a farm, at which he generally lived during the summer, and to which he wouldfrequently 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 andcuriously scarred, and the wife of a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixtureof negro blood. In the lean-to of this house was the laboratory where most of the chemicalexperiments were conducted. Curious porters and teamers who delivered bottles, bags, or boxes atthe small rear door would exchange accounts of the fantastic flasks, crucibles, alembics, andfurnaces 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 findingthe Philosopher’s Stone. The nearest neighbours to this farm—the Fenners, a quarter ofa mile away—had still queerer things to tell of certain sounds which they insisted came fromthe Curwen place in the night. There were cries, they said, and sustained howlings; and they didnot like the large number of livestock which thronged the pastures, for no such amount was neededto keep a lone old man and a very few servants in meat, milk, and wool. The identity of the stockseemed 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 highnarrow slits for windows.

Great Bridge idlers likewise had much to say of Curwen’s town house in OlneyCourt; not so much the fine new one built in 1761, when the man must have been nearly a centuryold, but the first low gambrel-roofed one with the windowless attic and shingled sides, whosetimbers he took the peculiar precaution of burning after its demolition. Here there was lessmystery, it is true; but the hours at which lights were seen, the secretiveness of the two swarthyforeigners who comprised the only menservants, the hideous indistinct mumbling of the incrediblyaged French housekeeper, the large amounts of food seen to enter a door within which only fourpersons lived, and the quality of certain voices often heard in muffled conversation athighly unseasonable times, all combined with what was known of the Pawtuxet farm to give the placea bad name.

In choicer circles, too, the Curwen home was by no means undiscussed; for as thenewcomer had gradually worked into the church and trading life of the town, he had naturally madeacquaintances of the better sort, whose company and conversation he was well fitted by education toenjoy. His birth was known to be good, since the Curwens or Corwins of Salem needed no introductionin New England. It developed that Joseph Curwen had travelled much in very early life, living for atime in England and making at least two voyages to the Orient; and his speech, when he deigned touse it, was that of a learned and cultivated Englishman. But for some reason or other Curwen didnot care for society. Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared such a wall ofreserve 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 hadcome 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, hedid not neglect calling on one of whom he soon heard so much; but left in a very short whilebecause of some sinister undercurrent he detected in his host’s discourse. Charles Ward toldhis father, when they discussed Curwen one winter evening, that he would give much to learn whatthe 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 hideouslyshocked, and could never recall Joseph Curwen without a visible loss of the gay urbanity for whichhe was famed.

More definite, however, was the reason why another man of taste and breedingavoided the haughty hermit. In 1746 Mr. John Merritt, an elderly English gentleman of literary andscientific 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 andLatin books. Hearing of Curwen as the owner of the best library in Providence, Mr. Merritt earlypaid him a call, and was more cordially received than most other callers at the house had been. Hisadmiration for his host’s ample shelves, which besides the Greek, Latin, and English classicswere equipped with a remarkable battery of philosophical, mathematical, and scientific worksincluding 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 anyonebefore; 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 himwith a lasting loathing. Perhaps, however, the facial expression of the owner in exhibiting themcontributed much of the prejudice. The bizarre collection, besides a host of standard works whichMr. Merritt was not too alarmed to envy, embraced nearly all the cabbalists, daemonologists, andmagicians known to man; and was a treasure-house of lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy andastrology. Hermes Trismegistus in Mesnard’s edition, the Turba Philosophorum,Geber’s Liber Investigationis, and Artephius’ Key of Wisdom all werethere; with the cabbalistic Zohar, Peter Jammy’s set of Albertus Magnus, RaymondLully’s Ars Magna et Ultima in Zetzner’s edition, Roger Bacon’sThesaurus Chemicus, Fludd’s Clavis Alchimiae, and Trithemius’ DeLapide Philosophico crowding them close. Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were represented inprofusion, and Mr. Merritt turned pale when, upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labelledas the Qanoon-e-Islam, he found it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the madArab Abdul Alhazred, of which he had heard such monstrous things whispered some years previouslyafter the exposure of nameless rites at the strange little fishing village of Kingsport, in theProvince of the Massachusetts-Bay.

But oddly enough, the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted bya mere minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face downward a badly worn copy ofBorellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia and interlineations in Curwen’s hand. The bookwas open at about its middle, and one paragraph displayed such thick and tremulous pen-strokesbeneath 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 strokeswhich formed the underscoring, he could not tell; but something in that combination affected himvery badly and very peculiarly. He recalled it to the end of his days, writing it down from memoryin his diary and once trying to recite it to his close friend Dr. Checkley till he saw how greatlyit disturbed the urbane rector. It read:

It was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street, however, thatthe worst things were muttered about Joseph Curwen. Sailors are superstitious folk; and theseasoned salts who manned the infinite rum, slave, and molasses sloops, the rakish privateers, andthe great brigs of the Browns, Crawfords, and Tillinghasts, all made strange furtive signs ofprotection when they saw the slim, deceptively young-looking figure with its yellow hair and slightstoop entering the Curwen warehouse in Doubloon Street or talking with captains and supercargoes onthe long quay where the Curwen ships rode restlessly. Curwen’s own clerks and captains hatedand 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 whichinspired the acutest and most tangible part of the fear in which the old man was held. A crew wouldbe turned loose in the town on shore leave, some of its members perhaps charged with this errand orthat; and when reassembled it would be almost sure to lack one or more men. That many of theerrands had concerned the farm on the Pawtuxet Road, and that few of the sailors had ever been seento return from that place, was not forgotten; so that in time it became exceedingly difficult forCurwen to keep his oddly assorted hands. Almost invariably several would desert soon after hearingthe gossip of the Providence wharves, and their replacement in the West Indies became anincreasingly great problem to the merchant.

In 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors anddaemoniac 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 in1758, for in March and April of that year two Royal regiments on their way to New France werequartered in Providence, and depleted by an inexplicable process far beyond the average rate ofdesertion. Rumour dwelt on the frequency with which Curwen was wont to be seen talking with thered-coated strangers; and as several of them began to be missed, people thought of the oddconditions 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 virtualmonopoly of the town’s trade in saltpetre, black pepper, and cinnamon, and easily led anyother 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 JamesGreen, at the Sign of the Elephant in Cheapside, the Russells, at the Sign of the Golden Eagleacross the Bridge, or Clark and Nightingale at the Frying-Pan and Fish near the 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 theprime exporters of the Colony.

Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When theColony House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the new brickone—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 manyof the books of the public library consumed in the Colony House fire, and bought heavily in thelottery that gave the muddy Market Parade and deep-rutted Town Street their pavement of great roundstones with a brick footwalk or “causey” in the middle. About this time, also, he builtthe plain but excellent new house whose doorway is still such a triumph of carving. When theWhitefield adherents broke off from Dr. Cotton’s hill church in 1743 and founded DeaconSnow’s church across the Bridge, Curwen had gone with them; though his zeal and attendancesoon abated. Now, however, he cultivated piety once more; as if to dispel the shadow which hadthrown him into isolation and would soon begin to wreck his business fortunes if not sharplychecked.

The sight of this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect yet certainlynot less than a full century old, seeking at last to emerge from a cloud of fright and detestationtoo 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 slightabatement in the visible aversion displayed toward him; especially after the rapid disappearancesof his sailors abruptly ceased. He must likewise have begun to practice an extreme care and secrecyin his graveyard expeditions, for he was never again caught at such wanderings; whilst the rumoursof uncanny sounds and manoeuvres at his Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion. His rate of foodconsumption and cattle replacement remained abnormally high; but not until modern times, whenCharles Ward examined a set of his accounts and invoices in the Shepley Library, did it occur toany person—save one embittered youth, perhaps—to make dark comparisons between thelarge number of Guinea blacks he imported until 1766, and the disturbingly small number for whom hecould produce bona fide bills of sale either to slave-dealers at the Great Bridge or to theplanters of the Narragansett Country. Certainly, the cunning and ingenuity of this abhorredcharacter were uncannily profound, once the necessity for their exercise had become impressed uponhim.

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 youthat a great age would have been enough to warrant; and he could see that in the end his fortuneswould 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 woulddeprive him of the trading advantages he had gained, it would not have profited him to begin anewin a different region just then. Judgment demanded that he patch up his relations with thetownsfolk of Providence, so that his presence might no longer be a signal for hushed conversation,transparent excuses of 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 wouldemploy, were giving him much worry; and he held to his sea-captains and mates only by shrewdness ingaining some kind of ascendancy over them—a mortgage, a promissory note, or a bit ofinformation 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-deadcould possibly have furnished some of the data which he had so glibly at his tongue’send.

About this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last desperate expedient to regainhis footing in the community. Hitherto a complete hermit, he now determined to contract anadvantageous marriage; securing as a bride some lady whose unquestioned position would make allostracism of his home impossible. It may be that he also had deeper reasons for wishing analliance; reasons so far outside the known cosmic sphere that only papers found a century and ahalf after his death caused anyone to suspect them; but of this nothing certain can ever belearned. Naturally he was aware of the horror and indignation with which any ordinary courtship ofhis would be received, hence he looked about for some likely candidate upon whose parents he mightexert a suitable pressure. Such candidates, he found, were not at all easy to discover; since hehad very particular requirements in the way of beauty, accomplishments, and social security. Atlength his survey narrowed down to the household of one of his best and oldest ship-captains, awidower of high birth and unblemished standing named Dutee Tillinghast, whose only daughter Elizaseemed dowered with every conceivable advantage save prospects as an heiress. Capt. Tillinghast wascompletely under the domination of Curwen; and consented, after a terrible interview in hiscupolaed 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 asgently as the reduced circ*mstances of her father permitted. She had attended StephenJackson’s school opposite the Court-House Parade; and had been diligently instructed by hermother, before the latter’s death of smallpox in 1757, in all the arts and refinements ofdomestic life. A sampler of hers, worked in 1753 at the age of nine, may still be found in therooms of the Rhode Island Historical Society. After her mother’s death she had kept thehouse, aided only by one old black woman. Her arguments with her father concerning the proposedCurwen marriage must have been painful indeed; but of these we have no record. Certain it is thather engagement to young Ezra Weeden, second mate of the Crawford packet Enterprise, wasdutifully 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 one of the most distinguished assemblages which thetown could boast; the ceremony being performed by the younger Samuel Winsor. The Gazettementioned the event very briefly, and in most surviving copies the item in question seems to be cutor torn out. Ward found a single intact copy after much search in the archives of a privatecollector of note, observing with amusem*nt the meaningless urbanity of the language:

The collection of Durfee-Arnold letters, discovered by Charles Ward shortly beforehis first reputed madness in the private collection of Melville F. Peters, Esq., of George St., andcovering this and a somewhat antecedent period, throws vivid light on the outrage done to publicsentiment by this ill-assorted match. The social influence of the Tillinghasts, however, was not tobe denied; and once more Joseph Curwen found his house frequented by persons whom he could neverotherwise have induced to cross his threshold. His acceptance was by no means complete, and hisbride was socially the sufferer through her forced venture; but at all events the wall of utterostracism was somewhat worn down. In his treatment of his wife the strange bridegroom astonishedboth her and the community by displaying an extreme graciousness and consideration. The new housein Olney Court was now wholly free from disturbing manifestations, and although Curwen was muchabsent at the Pawtuxet farm which his wife never visited, he seemed more like a normal citizen thanat 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 soabruptly broken. Ezra Weeden had frankly vowed vengeance; and though of a quiet and ordinarily milddisposition, was now gaining a hate-bred, dogged purpose which boded no good to the usurpinghusband.

On the seventh of May, 1765, Curwen’s only child Ann was born; and waschristened by the Rev. John Graves of King’s Church, of which both husband and wife hadbecome communicants shortly after their marriage, in order to compromise between their respectiveCongregational and Baptist affiliations. The record of this birth, as well as that of the marriagetwo years before, was stricken from most copies of the church and town annals where it ought toappear; and Charles Ward located both with the greatest difficulty after his discovery of thewidow’s change of name had apprised him of his own relationship, and engendered the feverishinterest which culminated in his madness. The birth entry, indeed, was found very curiously throughcorrespondence with the heirs of the loyalist Dr. Graves, who had taken with him a duplicate set ofrecords when he left his pastorate at the outbreak of the Revolution. Ward had tried this sourcebecause he knew that his great-great-grandmother Ann Tillinghast Potter had been anEpiscopalian.

Shortly after the birth of his daughter, an event he seemed to welcome with afervour greatly out of keeping with his usual coldness, Curwen resolved to sit for a portrait. Thishe had painted by a very gifted Scotsman named Cosmo Alexander, then a resident of Newport, andsince famous as the early teacher of Gilbert Stuart. The likeness was said to have been executed ona wall-panel of the library of the house in Olney Court, but neither of the two old diariesmentioning it gave any hint of its ultimate disposition. At this period the erratic scholar shewedsigns of unusual abstraction, and spent as much time as he possibly could at his farm on thePawtuxet Road. He seemed, it was stated, in a condition of suppressed excitement or suspense; as ifexpecting some phenomenal thing or on the brink of some strange discovery. Chemistry or alchemywould appear to have played a great part, for he took from his house to the farm the greater numberof his volumes on that subject.

His affectation of civic interest did not diminish, and he lost no opportunitiesfor helping such leaders as Stephen Hopkins, Joseph Brown, and Benjamin West in their efforts toraise the cultural tone of the town, which was then much below the level of Newport in itspatronage of the liberal arts. He had helped Daniel Jenckes found his bookshop in 1763, and wasthereafter his best customer; extending aid likewise to the struggling Gazette that appearedeach Wednesday at the Sign of Shakespear’s Head. In politics he ardently supported GovernorHopkins against the Ward party whose prime strength was in Newport, and his really eloquent speechat Hacker’s Hall in 1765 against the setting off of North Providence as a separate town witha pro-Ward vote in the General Assembly did more than any other one thing to wear down theprejudice against him. But Ezra Weeden, who watched him closely, sneered cynically at all thisoutward activity; and freely swore it was no more than a mask for some nameless traffick with theblackest gulfs of Tartarus. The revengeful youth began a systematic study of the man and his doingswhenever he was in port; spending hours at night by the wharves with a dory in readiness when hesaw lights in the Curwen warehouses, and following the small boat which would sometimes stealquietly off and down the bay. He also kept as close a watch as possible on the Pawtuxet farm, andwas 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 gainedwide notice amongst the curious townsfolk; for the air of suspense and expectancy dropped like anold cloak, giving instant place to an ill-concealed exaltation of perfect triumph. Curwen seemed tohave difficulty in restraining himself from public harangues on what he had found or learned ormade; but apparently the need of secrecy was greater than the longing to share his rejoicing, forno explanation was ever offered by him. It was after this transition, which appears to have comeearly in July, that the sinister scholar began to astonish people by his possession of informationwhich 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 washandled by the captains whom he now bound to him by ties of fear as potent as those of bankruptcyhad been. He altogether abandoned the slave trade, alleging that its profits were constantlydecreasing. Every possible moment was spent at the Pawtuxet farm; though there were rumours now andthen of his presence in places which, though not actually near graveyards, were yet so situated inrelation to graveyards that thoughtful people wondered just how thorough the old merchant’schange of habits really was. Ezra Weeden, though his periods of espionage were necessarily briefand intermittent on account of his sea voyaging, had a vindictive persistence which the bulk of thepractical townsfolk and farmers lacked; and subjected Curwen’s affairs to a scrutiny such asthey had never had before.

Many of the odd manoeuvres of the strange merchant’s vessels had been takenfor granted on account of the unrest of the times, when every colonist seemed determined to resistthe provisions of the Sugar Act which hampered a prominent traffick. Smuggling and evasion were therule 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 fromthe Curwen warehouses at the Town Street docks, soon felt assured that it was not merely HisMajesty’s armed ships which the sinister skulker was anxious to avoid. Prior to the change in1766 these boats had for the most part contained chained negroes, who were carried down and acrossthe bay and landed at an obscure point on the shore just north of Pawtuxet; being afterward drivenup the bluff and across country to the Curwen farm, where they were locked in that enormous stoneoutbuilding which had only high narrow slits for windows. After that change, however, the wholeprogramme was altered. Importation of slaves ceased at once, and for a time Curwen abandoned hismidnight sailings. Then, about the spring of 1767, a new policy appeared. Once more the lightersgrew wont to put out from the black, silent docks, and this time they would go down the bay somedistance, perhaps as far as Namquit Point, where they would meet and receive cargo from strangeships of considerable size and widely varied appearance. Curwen’s sailors would then depositthis cargo at the usual point on the shore, and transport it overland to the farm; locking it inthe same cryptical stone building which had formerly received the negroes. The cargo consistedalmost wholly of boxes and cases, of which a large proportion were oblong and heavy anddisturbingly suggestive of coffins.

Weeden always watched the farm with unremitting assiduity; visiting it each nightfor long periods, and seldom letting a week go by without a sight except when the ground bore afootprint-revealing snow. Even then he would often walk as close as possible in the travelled roador on the ice of the neighbouring river to see what tracks others might have left. Finding his ownvigils interrupted by nautical duties, he hired a tavern companion named Eleazar Smith to continuethe survey during his absences; and between them the two could have set in motion someextraordinary rumours. That they did not do so was only because they knew the effect of publicitywould be to warn their quarry and make further progress impossible. Instead, they wished to learnsomething 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 ofhis notebooks. All that can be told of their discoveries is what Eleazar Smith jotted down in anone too coherent diary, and what other diarists and letter-writers have timidly repeated from thestatements which they finally made—and according to which the farm was only the outer shellof some vast and revolting menace, of a scope and depth too profound and intangible for more thanshadowy comprehension.

It is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a great series oftunnels and catacombs, inhabited by a very sizeable staff of persons besides the old Indian and hiswife, underlay the farm. The house was an old peaked relic of the middle seventeenth century withenormous stack chimney and diamond-paned lattice windows, the laboratory being in a lean-to towardthe north, where the roof came nearly to the ground. This building stood clear of any other; yetjudging by the different voices heard at odd times within, it must have been accessible throughsecret passages beneath. These voices, before 1766, were mere mumblings and negro whisperings andfrenzied screams, coupled with curious chants or invocations. After that date, however, theyassumed a very singular and terrible cast as they ran the gamut betwixt dronings of dullacquiescence and explosions of frantic pain or fury, rumblings of conversation and whines ofentreaty, 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, orthreatening. Sometimes it seemed that several persons must be in the house; Curwen, certaincaptives, and the guards of those captives. There were voices of a sort that neither Weeden norSmith had ever heard before despite their wide knowledge of foreign parts, and many that they didseem to place as belonging to this or that nationality. The nature of the conversations seemedalways a kind of catechism, as if Curwen were extorting some sort of information from terrified orrebellious 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. Hedid, however, say that besides a few ghoulish dialogues in which the past affairs of Providencefamilies were concerned, most of the questions and answers he could understand were historical orscientific; occasionally pertaining to very remote places and ages. Once, for example, analternately raging and sullen figure was questioned in French about the Black Prince’smassacre at Limoges in 1370, as if there were some hidden reason which he ought to know. Curwenasked the prisoner—if prisoner it were—whether the order to slay was given because ofthe Sign of the Goat found on the altar in the ancient Roman crypt beneath the Cathedral, orwhether the Dark Man of the Haute Vienne Coven had spoken the Three Words. Failing to obtainreplies, the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means; for there was a terrific shriekfollowed by silence and muttering and a bumping sound.

None of these colloquies were ever ocularly witnessed, since the windows werealways heavily draped. Once, though, during a discourse in an unknown tongue, a shadow was seen onthe curtain which startled Weeden exceedingly; reminding him of one of the puppets in a show he hadseen in the autumn of 1764 in Hacker’s Hall, when a man from Germantown, Pennsylvania, hadgiven a clever mechanical spectacle advertised as a “View of the Famous City of Jerusalem, inwhich are represented Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon, his Royal Throne, the noted Towers, andHills, likewise the Sufferings of Our Saviour from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross on theHill of Golgotha; an artful piece of Statuary, Worthy to be seen by the Curious.” It was onthis occasion that the listener, who had crept close to the window of the front room whence thespeaking proceeded, gave a start which roused the old Indian pair and caused them to loose the dogson him. After that no more conversations were ever heard in the house, and Weeden and Smithconcluded that Curwen had transferred his field of action to regions below.

That such regions in truth existed, seemed amply clear from many things. Faintcries and groans unmistakably came up now and then from what appeared to be the solid earth inplaces far from any structure; whilst hidden in the bushes along the river-bank in the rear, wherethe high ground sloped steeply down to the valley of the Pawtuxet, there was found an arched oakendoor in a frame of heavy masonry, which was obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill. Whenor how these catacombs could have been constructed, Weeden was unable to say; but he frequentlypointed 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 1769the two watchers kept a sharp eye on the steep river-bank to see if any subterrene secrets might bewashed to light, and were rewarded by the sight of a profusion of both human and animal bones inplaces where deep gullies had been worn in the banks. Naturally there might be many explanations ofsuch things in the rear of a stock farm, and in a locality where old Indian burying-grounds werecommon, but Weeden and Smith drew their own inferences.

It was in January 1770, whilst Weeden and Smith were still debating vainly onwhat, if anything, to think or do about the whole bewildering business, that the incident of theFortaleza occurred. Exasperated by the burning of the revenue sloop Liberty atNewport during the previous summer, the customs fleet under Admiral Wallace had adopted anincreased vigilance concerning strange vessels; and on this occasion HisMajesty’s armed schooner Cygnet, under Capt. Charles Leslie, capturedafter a short pursuit one early morning the snow 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 revealedthe 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 lighterjust off Namquit Point and whose identity Capt. Arruda felt himself in honourbound not to reveal. The Vice-Admiralty Court at Newport, at a loss what to doin view of the non-contraband nature of the cargo on the one hand and of theunlawful secrecy of the entry on the other hand, compromised on CollectorRobinson’s recommendation by freeing the ship but forbidding it a port in Rhode Islandwaters. There were later rumours of its having been seen in Boston Harbour, though it never openlyentered the Port of Boston.

This extraordinary incident did not fail of wide remark in Providence, and therewere not many who doubted the existence of some connexion between the cargo of mummies and thesinister Joseph Curwen. His exotic studies and his curious chemical importations being commonknowledge, and his fondness for graveyards being common suspicion; it did not take much imaginationto link him with a freakish importation which could not conceivably have been destined for anyoneelse in the town. As if conscious of this natural belief, Curwen took care to speak casually onseveral occasions of the chemical value of the balsams found in mummies; thinking perhaps that hemight 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; andindulged in the wildest theories concerning Curwen and his monstrous labours.

The following spring, like that of the year before, had heavy rains; and thewatchers kept careful track of the river-bank behind the Curwen farm. Large sections were washedaway, and a certain number of bones discovered; but no glimpse was afforded of any actualsubterranean chambers or burrows. Something was rumoured, however, at the village of Pawtuxet abouta mile below, where the river flows in falls over a rocky terrace to join the placid landlockedcove. There, where quaint old cottages climbed the hill from the rustic bridge, and fishing-smackslay anchored at their sleepy docks, a vague report went round of things that were floating down theriver and flashing into sight for a minute as they went over the falls. Of course the Pawtuxet is along river which winds through many settled regions abounding in graveyards, and of course thespring rains had been very heavy; but the fisherfolk about the bridge did not like the wild waythat one of the things stared as it shot down to the still water below, or the way that anotherhalf cried out although its condition had greatly departed from that of objects which normally cryout. That rumour sent Smith—for Weeden was just then at sea—in haste to the river-bankbehind the farm; where surely enough there remained the evidences of an extensive cave-in. Therewas, however, no trace of a passage into the steep bank; for the miniature avalanche had leftbehind a solid wall of mixed earth and shrubbery from aloft. Smith went to the extent of someexperimental digging, but was deterred by lack of success—or perhaps by fear of possiblesuccess. It is interesting to speculate on what the persistent and revengeful Weeden would havedone had he been ashore at the time.

By the autumn of 1770 Weeden decided that the time was ripe to tell others of hisdiscoveries; for he had a large number of facts to link together, and a second eye-witness torefute the possible charge that jealousy and vindictiveness had spurred his fancy. As his firstconfidant he selected Capt. James Mathewson of the Enterprise, who on the one hand knew himwell enough not to doubt his veracity, and on the other hand was sufficiently influential in thetown to be heard in turn with respect. The colloquy took place in an upper room of Sabin’sTavern near the docks, with Smith present to corroborate virtually every statement; and it could beseen that Capt. Mathewson was tremendously impressed. Like nearly everyone else in the town, he hadhad black suspicions of his own anent Joseph Curwen; hence it needed only this confirmation andenlargement of data to convince him absolutely. At the end of the conference he was very grave, andenjoined strict silence upon the two younger men. He would, he said, transmit the informationseparately to some ten or so of the most learned and prominent citizens of Providence; ascertainingtheir views and following whatever advice they might have to offer. Secrecy would probably beessential 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 thesealready troublous times a repetition of that frightful Salem panic of less than a century beforewhich had first brought Curwen hither.

The right persons to tell, he believed, would be Dr. Benjamin West, whose pamphleton the late transit of Venus proved him a scholar and keen thinker; Rev. James Manning, Presidentof the College which had just moved up from Warren and was temporarily housed in the new KingStreet 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 wasa man of very broad perceptions; John Carter, publisher of the Gazette; all four of theBrown brothers, John, Joseph, Nicholas, and Moses, who formed the recognised local magnates, and ofwhom Joseph was an amateur scientist of parts; old Dr. Jabez Bowen, whose erudition wasconsiderable, 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 leadin any active measures needed. These men, if favourable, might eventually be brought together forcollective deliberation; and with them would rest the responsibility of deciding whether or not toinform the Governor of the Colony, Joseph Wanton of Newport, before taking action.

The mission of Capt. Mathewson prospered beyond his highest expectations; forwhilst he found one or two of the chosen confidants somewhat sceptical of the possible ghastly sideof Weeden’s tale, there was not one who did not think it necessary to take some sort ofsecret and coördinated action. Curwen, it was clear, formed a vague potential menace to thewelfare of the town and Colony; and must be eliminated at any cost. Late in December 1770 a groupof 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 Smithwere summoned to give testimony anent details. Something very like fear seized the whole assemblagebefore 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 extentapparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town. Namelessreprisals might ensue, and even if the sinister creature complied, the removal would be no morethan the shifting of an unclean burden to another place. The times were lawless, and men who hadflouted the King’s revenue forces for years were not the ones to balk at sterner things whenduty impelled. Curwen must be surprised at his Pawtuxet farm by a large raiding-party of seasonedprivateersmen and given one decisive chance to explain himself. If he proved a madman, amusinghimself with shrieks and imaginary conversations in different voices, he would be properlyconfined. If something graver appeared, and if the underground horrors indeed turned out to bereal, he and all with him must die. It could be done quietly, and even the widow and her fatherneed not be told how it came about.

While these serious steps were under discussion there occurred in the town anincident so terrible and inexplicable that for a time little else was mentioned for miles around.In the middle of a moonlight January night with heavy snow underfoot there resounded over the riverand up the hill a shocking series of cries which brought sleepy heads to every window; and peoplearound Weybosset Point saw a great white thing plunging frantically along the badly cleared spacein front of the Turk’s Head. There was a baying of dogs in the distance, but this subsided assoon as the clamour of the awakened town became audible. Parties of men with lanterns and musketshurried 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 southernpiers 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 notso much the younger as the older folk who whispered, for only in the patriarchs did that rigid facewith horror-bulging eyes strike any chord of memory. They, shaking as they did so, exchangedfurtive murmurs of wonder and fear; for in those stiff, hideous features lay a resemblance somarvellous as to be almost an identity—and that identity was with a man who had died fullfifty years before.

Ezra Weeden was present at the finding; and remembering the baying of the nightbefore, set out along Weybosset Street and across Muddy Dock Bridge whence the sound had come. Hehad a curious expectancy, and was not surprised when, reaching the edge of the settled districtwhere 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 thehounds and their masters could be easily traced. They had given up the chase upon coming too nearthe town. Weeden smiled grimly, and as a perfunctory detail traced the footprints back to theirsource. It was the Pawtuxet farm of Joseph Curwen, as he well knew it would be; and he would havegiven much had the yard been less confusingly trampled. As it was, he dared not seem too interestedin full daylight. Dr. Bowen, to whom Weeden went at once with his report, performed an autopsy onthe strange corpse, and discovered peculiarities which baffled him utterly. The digestive tracts ofthe huge man seemed never to have been in use, whilst the whole skin had a coarse, loosely knittexture impossible to account for. Impressed by what the old men whispered of this body’slikeness to the long-dead blacksmith Daniel Green, whose great-grandson Aaron Hoppin was asupercargo in Curwen’s employ, Weeden asked casual questions till he found where Green wasburied. That night a party of ten visited the old North Burying Ground opposite Herrenden’sLane and opened a grave. They found it vacant, precisely as they had expected.

Meanwhile arrangements had been made with the post riders to intercept JosephCurwen’s mail, and shortly before the incident of the naked body there was found a letterfrom 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, ranas follows:

Another and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked equal thought, especiallyfor the following passage:

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 isclumsily copied; and authorities at Brown University have pronounced the alphabet Amharic orAbyssinian, although they do not recognise the word. None of these epistles was ever delivered toCurwen, though the disappearance of Jedediah Orne from Salem as recorded shortly afterward shewedthat the Providence men took certain quiet steps. The Pennsylvania Historical Society also has somecurious letters received by Dr. Shippen regarding the presence of an unwholesome character inPhiladelphia. But more decisive steps were in the air, and it is in the secret assemblages of swornand tested sailors and faithful old privateersmen in the Brown warehouses by night that we mustlook for the main fruits of Weeden’s disclosures. Slowly and surely a plan of campaign wasunder 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 thetown and on the Pawtuxet Road, and he dropped little by little the air of forced geniality withwhich he had latterly sought to combat the town’s prejudice. The nearest neighbours to hisfarm, the Fenners, one night remarked a great shaft of light shooting into the sky from someaperture 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 theexecutive leader of the select group bent on Curwen’s extirpation, and had informed theFenners that some action was about to be taken. This he deemed needful because of the impossibilityof their not witnessing the final raid; and he explained his course by saying that Curwen was knownto be a spy of the customs officers at Newport, against whom the hand of every Providence shipper,merchant, and farmer was openly or clandestinely raised. Whether the ruse was wholly believed byneighbours who had seen so many queer things is not certain; but at any rate the Fenners werewilling to connect any evil with a man of such queer ways. To them Mr. Brown had entrusted the dutyof watching the Curwen farmhouse, and of regularly reporting every incident which took placethere.

The probability that Curwen was on guard and attempting unusual things, assuggested by the odd shaft of light, precipitated at last the action so carefully devised by theband of serious citizens. According to the Smith diary a company of about 100 men met at 10 p.m. onFriday, April 12th, 1771, in the great room of Thurston’s Tavern at the Sign of the GoldenLion on Weybosset Point across the Bridge. Of the guiding group of prominent men in addition to theleader John Brown there were present Dr. Bowen, with his case of surgical instruments, PresidentManning without the great periwig (the largest in the Colonies) for which he was noted, GovernorHopkins, wrapped in his dark cloak and accompanied by his seafaring brother Esek, whom he hadinitiated at the last moment with the permission of the rest, John Carter, Capt. Mathewson, andCapt. Whipple, who was to lead the actual raiding party. These chiefs conferred apart in a rearchamber, after which Capt. Whipple emerged to the great room and gave the gathered seamen theirlast oaths and instructions. Eleazar Smith was with the leaders as they sat in the rear apartmentawaiting the arrival of Ezra Weeden, whose duty was to keep track of Curwen and report thedeparture of his coach for the farm.

About 10:30 a heavy rumble was heard on the Great Bridge, followed by the sound ofa coach in the street outside; and at that hour there was no need of waiting for Weeden in order toknow that the doomed man had set out for his last night of unhallowed wizardry. A moment later, asthe receding coach clattered faintly over the Muddy Dock Bridge, Weeden appeared; and the raidersfell silently into military order in the street, shouldering the firelocks, fowling-pieces, orwhaling harpoons which they had with them. Weeden and Smith were with the party, and of thedeliberating citizens there were present for active service Capt. Whipple, the leader, Capt. EsekHopkins, 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. Allthese freemen and their hundred sailors began the long march without delay, grim and a trifleapprehensive as they left the Muddy Dock behind and mounted the gentle rise of Broad Street towardthe Pawtuxet Road. Just beyond Elder Snow’s church some of the men turned back to take aparting look at Providence lying outspread under the early spring stars. Steeples and gables rosedark and shapely, and salt breezes swept up gently from the cove north of the Bridge. Vega wasclimbing above the great hill across the water, whose crest of trees was broken by the roof-line ofthe unfinished College edifice. At the foot of that hill, and along the narrow mounting lanes ofits side, the old town dreamed; Old Providence, for whose safety and sanity so monstrous andcolossal a blasphemy was about to be wiped out.

An hour and a quarter later the raiders arrived, as previously agreed, at theFenner farmhouse; where they heard a final report on their intended victim. He had reached his farmover half an hour before, and the strange light had soon afterward shot once into the sky, butthere were no lights in any visible windows. This was always the case of late. Even as this newswas given another great glare arose toward the south, and the party realised that they had indeedcome close to the scene of awesome and unnatural wonders. Capt. Whipple now ordered his force toseparate into three divisions; one of twenty men under Eleazar Smith to strike across to the shoreand guard the landing-place against possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by amessenger for desperate service, a second of twenty men under Capt. Esek Hopkins to steal down intothe river valley behind the Curwen farm and demolish with axes or gunpowder the oaken door in thehigh, steep bank, and the third to close in on the house and adjacent buildings themselves. Of thisdivision one third was to be led by Capt. Mathewson to the cryptical stone edifice with high narrowwindows, another third to follow Capt. Whipple himself to the main farmhouse, and the remainingthird to preserve a circle around the whole group of buildings until summoned by a final emergencysignal.

The river party would break down the hillside door at the sound of a singlewhistle-blast, then waiting and capturing anything which might issue from the regions within. Atthe sound of two whistle-blasts it would advance through the aperture to oppose the enemy or jointhe rest of the raiding contingent. The party at the stone building would accept these respectivesignals in an analogous manner; forcing an entrance at the first, and at the second descendingwhatever passage into the ground might be discovered, and joining the general or focal warfareexpected to take place within the caverns. A third or emergency signal of three blasts would summonthe immediate reserve from its general guard duty; its twenty men dividing equally and entering theunknown depths through both farmhouse and stone building. Capt. Whipple’s belief in theexistence of catacombs was absolute, and he took no alternative into consideration when making hisplans. He had with him a whistle of great power and shrillness, and did not fear any upsetting ormisunderstanding of signals. The final reserve at the landing, of course, was nearly out of thewhistle’s range; hence would require a special messenger if needed for help. Moses Brown andJohn Carter went with Capt. Hopkins to the river-bank, while President Manning was detailed withCapt. 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 amessenger from Capt. Hopkins had joined Capt. Whipple to notify him of the river party’sreadiness. The leader would then deliver the loud single blast, and the various advance partieswould commence their simultaneous attack on three points. Shortly before 1 a.m. the three divisionsleft the Fenner farmhouse; one to guard the landing, another to seek the river valley and thehillside door, and the third to subdivide and attend to the actual buildings of the Curwenfarm.

Eleazar Smith, who accompanied the shore-guarding party, records in his diary anuneventful march and a long wait on the bluff by the bay; broken once by what seemed to be thedistant sound of the signal whistle and again by a peculiar muffled blend of roaring and crying anda powder blast which seemed to come from the same direction. Later on one man thought he caughtsome distant gunshots, and still later Smith himself felt the throb of titanic and thunderous wordsresounding in upper air. It was just before dawn that a single haggard messenger with wild eyes anda hideous unknown odour about his clothing appeared and told the detachment to disperse quietly totheir homes and never again think or speak of the night’s doings or of him who had beenJoseph Curwen. Something about the bearing of the messenger carried a conviction which his merewords could never have conveyed; for though he was a seaman well known to many of them, there wassomething obscurely lost or gained in his soul which set him for evermore apart. It was the samelater on when they met other old companions who had gone into that zone of horror. Most of them hadlost or gained something imponderable and indescribable. They had seen or heard or felt somethingwhich 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 singlemessenger the party at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost sealed their own lips. Very feware the rumours which ever came from any of them, and Eleazar Smith’s diary is the onlywritten record which has survived from that whole expedition which set forth from the Sign of theGolden Lion under the stars.

Charles Ward, however, discovered another vague sidelight in some Fennercorrespondence 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 thedeparting 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 arepetition of the great shaft of light from the stone building, and in another moment, after aquick sounding of the second signal ordering a general invasion, there had come a subdued prattleof musketry followed by a horrible roaring cry which the correspondent Luke Fenner had representedin his epistle by the characters “Waaaahrrrrr—R’waaahrrr”. This cry,however, had possessed a quality which no mere writing could convey, and the correspondent mentionsthat his mother fainted completely at the sound. It was later repeated less loudly, and further butmore muffled evidences of gunfire ensued; together with a loud explosion of powder from thedirection of the river. About an hour afterward all the dogs began to bark frightfully, and therewere vague ground rumblings so marked that the candlesticks tottered on the mantelpiece. A strongsmell of sulphur was noted; and Luke Fenner’s father declared that he heard the third oremergency 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; akind of throaty, nastily plastic cough or gurgle whose quality as a scream must have come more fromits 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 tolie, 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 humanorigin was plainly distinguished. Fenner wrote that he could even gather a few words belched infrenzy: “Almighty, protect thy lamb!” Then there were more shots, and the secondflaming thing fell. After that came silence for about three-quarters of an hour; at the end ofwhich time little Arthur Fenner, Luke’s brother, exclaimed that he saw ‘a redfog’ going up to the stars from the accursed farm in the distance. No one but the child cantestify to this, but Luke admits the significant coincidence implied by the panic of almostconvulsive fright which at the same moment arched the backs and stiffened the fur of the three catsthen within the room.

Five minutes later a chill wind blew up, and the air became suffused with such anintolerable stench that only the strong freshness of the sea could have prevented its being noticedby the shore party or by any wakeful souls in Pawtuxet village. This stench was nothing which anyof the Fenners had ever encountered before, and produced a kind of clutching, amorphous fear beyondthat of the tomb or the charnel-house. Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearerwill ever be able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows rattled as itsechoes died away. It was deep and musical; powerful as a bass organ, but evil as the forbiddenbooks of the Arabs. What it said no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this isthe writing Luke Fenner set down to portray the daemoniac intonations:“DEESMEES-JESHET-BONE DOSEFE DUVEMA-ENITEMOSS”. Not till the year1919 did any soul link this crude transcript with anything else in mortal knowledge, but CharlesWard paled as he recognised what Mirandola had denounced in shudders as the ultimate horror amongblack magic’s incantations.

An unmistakably human shout or deep chorused scream seemed to answer this malignwonder from the Curwen farm, after which the unknown stench grew complex with an added odourequally intolerable. A wailing distinctly different from the scream now burst out, and wasprotracted ululantly in rising and falling paroxysms. At times it became almost articulate, thoughno auditor could trace any definite words; and at one point it seemed to verge toward the confinesof diabolic and hysterical laughter. Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark madnesswrenched from scores of human throats—a yell which came strong and clear despite the depthfrom which it must have burst; after which darkness and silence ruled all things. Spirals of acridsmoke ascended to blot out the stars, though no flames appeared and no buildings were observed tobe gone or injured on the following day.

Toward dawn two frightened messengers with monstrous and unplaceable odourssaturating their clothing knocked at the Fenner door and requested a keg of rum, for which theypaid very well indeed. One of them told the family that the affair of Joseph Curwen was over, andthat the events of the night were not to be mentioned again. Arrogant as the order seemed, theaspect of him who gave it took away all resentment and lent it a fearsome authority; so that onlythese furtive letters of Luke Fenner, which he urged his Connecticut relative to destroy, remain totell what was seen and heard. The non-compliance of that relative, whereby the letters were savedafter all, has alone kept the matter from a merciful oblivion. Charles Ward had one detail to addas a result of a long canvass of Pawtuxet residents for ancestral traditions. Old Charles Slocum ofthat 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 keptthe talk alive was the notion that this body, so far as could be seen in its burnt and twistedcondition, was neither thoroughly human nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk hadever seen or read about.

Not one man who participated in that terrible raid could ever be induced to say aword concerning it, and every fragment of the vague data which survives comes from those outsidethe final fighting party. There is something frightful in the care with which these actual raidersdestroyed 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 aclash with customs officers had occurred. The same statement also covered the numerous cases ofwounds, all of which were extensively bandaged and treated only by Dr. Jabez Bowen, who hadaccompanied the party. Hardest to explain was the nameless odour clinging to all the raiders, athing which was discussed for weeks. Of the citizen leaders, Capt. Whipple and Moses Brown weremost severely hurt, and letters of their wives testify the bewilderment which their reticence andclose guarding of their bandages produced. Psychologically every participant was aged, sobered, andshaken. 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 smotheredmemories in prayers. Every man of those leaders had a stirring part to play in later years, and itis perhaps fortunate that this is so. Little more than a twelvemonth afterward Capt. Whipple ledthe mob who burnt the revenue ship Gaspee, and in this bold act we may trace one step in theblotting out of unwholesome images.

There was delivered to the widow of Joseph Curwen a sealed leaden coffin ofcurious design, obviously found ready on the spot when needed, in which she was told herhusband’s body lay. He had, it was explained, been killed in a customs battle about which itwas not politic to give details. More than this no tongue ever uttered of Joseph Curwen’send, and Charles Ward had only a single hint wherewith to construct a theory. This hint was themerest thread—a shaky underscoring of a passage in Jedediah Orne’s confiscated letterto Curwen, as partly copied in Ezra Weeden’s handwriting. The copy was found in thepossession of Smith’s descendants; and we are left to decide whether Weeden gave it to hiscompanion after the end, as a mute clue to the abnormality which had occurred, or whether, as ismore probable, Smith had it before, and added the underscoring himself from what he had managed toextract from his friend by shrewd guessing and adroit cross-questioning. The underlined passage ismerely this:

In the light of this passage, and reflecting on what last unmentionable allies a beaten man mighttry to summon in his direst extremity, Charles Ward may well have wondered whether any citizen ofProvidence killed Joseph Curwen.

The deliberate effacement of every memory of the dead man from Providence life andannals was vastly aided by the influence of the raiding leaders. They had not at first meant to beso thorough, and had allowed the widow and her father and child to remain in ignorance of the trueconditions; but Capt. Tillinghast was an astute man, and soon uncovered enough rumours to whet hishorror and cause him to demand that his daughter and granddaughter change their name, burn thelibrary and all remaining papers, and chisel the inscription from the slate slab above JosephCurwen’s grave. He knew Capt. Whipple well, and probably extracted more hints from that bluffmariner than anyone else ever gained respecting the end of the accused sorcerer.

From that time on the obliteration of Curwen’s memory became increasinglyrigid, extending at last by common consent even to the town records and files of theGazette. It can be compared in spirit only to the hush that lay on Oscar Wilde’s namefor a decade after his disgrace, and in extent only to the fate of that sinful King of Runazar inLord Dunsany’s tale, whom the Gods decided must not only cease to be, but must cease ever tohave been.

Mrs. Tillinghast, as the widow became known after 1772, sold the house in OlneyCourt and resided with her father in Power’s Lane till her death in 1817. The farm atPawtuxet, shunned by every living soul, remained to moulder through the years; and seemed to decaywith unaccountable rapidity. By 1780 only the stone and brickwork were standing, and by 1800 eventhese had fallen to shapeless heaps. None ventured to pierce the tangled shrubbery on theriver-bank behind which the hillside door may have lain, nor did any try to frame a definite imageof 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 awhile to himself, “Pox on that ———, but he had no business to laugh whilehe screamed. ’Twas as though the damn’d ——— had some’at up hissleeve. For half a crown I’d burn his ——— house.”

III. A Search and an Evocation

Charles Ward, as we have seen, first learned in 1918 of his descent from Joseph Curwen. That he atonce took an intense interest in everything pertaining to the bygone mystery is not to be wonderedat; for every vague rumour that he had heard of Curwen now became something vital to himself, inwhom flowed Curwen’s blood. No spirited and imaginative genealogist could have done otherwisethan begin forthwith an avid and systematic collection of Curwen data.

In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at secrecy; so that evenDr. Lyman hesitates to date the youth’s madness from any period before the close of 1919. Hetalked freely with his family—though his mother was not particularly pleased to own anancestor 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 noconcealment of his object, and shared the somewhat amused scepticism with which the accounts of theold diarists and letter-writers were regarded. He often expressed a keen wonder as to what reallyhad taken place a century and a half before at that Pawtuxet farmhouse whose site he vainly triedto find, and what Joseph Curwen really had been.

When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered the letter fromJedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look up Curwen’s early activities and connexionsthere, which he did during the Easter vacation of 1919. At the Essex Institute, which was wellknown to him from former sojourns in the glamorous old town of crumbling Puritan gables andclustered gambrel roofs, he was very kindly received, and unearthed there a considerable amount ofCurwen data. He found that his ancestor was born in Salem-Village, now Danvers, seven miles fromtown, on the eighteenth of February (O.S.) 1662-3; and that he had run away to sea at the ageof fifteen, not appearing again for nine years, when he returned with the speech, dress, andmanners of a native Englishman and settled in Salem proper. At that time he had little to do withhis family, but spent most of his hours with the curious books he had brought from Europe, and thestrange chemicals which came for him on ships from England, France, and Holland. Certain trips ofhis into the country were the objects of much local inquisitiveness, and were whisperinglyassociated with vague rumours of fires on the hills at night.

Curwen’s only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of Salem-Villageand one Simon Orne of Salem. With these men he was often seen in conference about the Common, andvisits 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. Hewas said to entertain strange visitors, and the lights seen from his windows were not always of thesame colour. The knowledge he displayed concerning long-dead persons and long-forgotten events wasconsidered 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 inProvidence was soon learned of. Simon Orne lived in Salem until 1720, when his failure to growvisibly old began to excite attention. He thereafter disappeared, though thirty years later hisprecise counterpart and self-styled son turned up to claim his property. The claim was allowed onthe strength of documents in Simon Orne’s known hand, and Jedediah Orne continued to dwell inSalem till 1771, when certain letters from Providence citizens to the Rev. Thomas Barnard andothers brought about his quiet removal to parts unknown.

Certain documents by and about all of these strange characters were available atthe Essex Institute, the Court House, and the Registry of Deeds, and included both harmlesscommonplaces such as land titles and bills of sale, and furtive fragments of a more provocativenature. There were four or five unmistakable allusions to them on the witchcraft trial records; aswhen one Hepzibah Lawson swore on July 10, 1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer under JudgeHathorne, 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 JudgeGedney that “Mr. G. B. (Rev. George Burroughs) on that Nighte putt y e Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O.,Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.” Then there was acatalogue of Hutchinson’s uncanny library as found after his disappearance, and an unfinishedmanuscript in his handwriting, couched in a cipher none could read. Ward had a photostatic copy ofthis 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 isreason 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 the greatest immediate interest was the Orne material. It took Ward only ashort time to prove from identity of penmanship a thing he had already considered established fromthe text of the letter to Curwen; namely, that Simon Orne and his supposed son were one and thesame 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 asa representative of a new generation. Orne had apparently been careful to destroy most of hiscorrespondence, but the citizens who took action in 1771 found and preserved a few letters andpapers which excited their wonder. There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other handswhich Ward now either copied with care or had photographed, and one extremely mysterious letter ina chirography that the searcher recognised from items in the Registry of Deeds as positively JosephCurwen’s.

This Curwen letter, though undated as to the year, was evidently not the one inanswer to which Orne had written the confiscated missive; and from internal evidence Ward placed itnot much later than 1750. It may not be amiss to give the text in full, as a sample of the style ofone whose history was so dark and terrible. The recipient is addressed as “Simon”, buta line (whether drawn by Curwen or Orne Ward could not tell) is run through the word.

This letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the exact location ofCurwen’s Providence home; for none of the records encountered up to that time had been at allspecific. The discovery was doubly striking because it indicated as the newer Curwen house built in1761 on the site of the old, a dilapidated building still standing in Olney Court and well known toWard in his antiquarian rambles over Stampers’ Hill. The place was indeed only a few squaresfrom his own home on the great hill’s higher ground, and was now the abode of a negro familymuch esteemed for occasional washing, housecleaning, and furnace-tending services. To find, indistant Salem, such sudden proof of the significance of this familiar rookery in his own familyhistory, was a highly impressive thing to Ward; and he resolved to explore the place immediatelyupon his return. The more mystical phases of the letter, which he took to be some extravagant kindof symbolism, frankly baffled him; though he noted with a thrill of curiosity that the Biblicalpassage referred to—Job 14, 14—was the familiar verse, “If a man die, shall helive again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.”

Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement, and spent the followingSaturday in a long and exhaustive study of the house in Olney Court. The place, now crumbling withage, had never been a mansion; but was a modest two-and-a-half story wooden town house of thefamiliar Providence colonial type, with plain peaked roof, large central chimney, and artisticallycarved doorway with rayed fanlight, triangular pediment, and trim Doric pilasters. It had sufferedbut little alteration externally, and Ward felt he was gazing on something very close to thesinister matters of his quest.

The present negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very courteously shewnabout the interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah. Here there was more change than theoutside indicated, and Ward saw with regret that fully half of the fine scroll-and-urn overmantelsand shell-carved cupboard linings were gone, whilst much of the fine wainscotting and bolectionmoulding was marked, hacked, and gouged, or covered up altogether with cheap wall-paper. Ingeneral, the survey did not yield as much as Ward had somehow expected; but it was at leastexciting to stand within the ancestral walls which had housed such a man of horror as JosephCurwen. He saw with a thrill that a monogram had been very carefully effaced from the ancient brassknocker.

From then until after the close of school Ward spent his time on the photostaticcopy of the Hutchinson cipher and the accumulation of local Curwen data. The former still provedunyielding; 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 whosepresence in those places was indicated. This trip was very fruitful, for it brought him the Fennerletters with their terrible description of the Pawtuxet farmhouse raid, and the Nightingale-Talbotletters in which he learned of the portrait painted on a panel of the Curwen library. This matterof the portrait interested him particularly, since he would have given much to know just whatJoseph Curwen looked like; and he decided to make a second search of the house in Olney Court tosee if there might not be some trace of the ancient features beneath peeling coats of later paintor layers of mouldy wall-paper.

Early in August that search took place, and Ward went carefully over the walls ofevery room sizeable enough to have been by any possibility the library of the evil builder. He paidespecial attention to the large panels of such overmantels as still remained; and was keenlyexcited after about an hour, when on a broad area above the fireplace in a spacious ground-floorroom he became certain that the surface brought out by the peeling of several coats of paint wassensibly darker than any ordinary interior paint or the wood beneath it was likely to have been. Afew more careful tests with a thin knife, and he knew that he had come upon an oil portrait ofgreat extent. With truly scholarly restraint the youth did not risk the damage which an immediateattempt to uncover the hidden picture with the knife might have done, but just retired from thescene of his discovery to enlist expert help. In three days he returned with an artist of longexperience, Mr. Walter C. Dwight, whose studio is near the foot of College Hill; and thataccomplished 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 reimbursedfor this invasion of their domestic hearth.

As day by day the work of restoration progressed, Charles Ward looked on withgrowing interest at the lines and shades gradually unveiled after their long oblivion. Dwight hadbegun at the bottom; hence since the picture was a three-quarter-length one, the face did not comeout for some time. It was meanwhile seen that the subject was a spare, well-shaped man withdark-blue coat, embroidered waistcoat, black satin small-clothes, and white silk stockings, seatedin a carved chair against the background of a window with wharves and ships beyond. When the headcame out it was observed to bear a neat Albemarle wig, and to possess a thin, calm, undistinguishedface which seemed somehow familiar to both Ward and the artist. Only at the very last, though, didthe restorer and his client begin to gasp with astonishment at the details of that lean, pallidvisage, and to recognise with a touch of awe the dramatic trick which heredity had played. For ittook the final bath of oil and the final stroke of the delicate scraper to bring out fully theexpression which centuries had hidden; and to confront the bewildered Charles Dexter Ward, dwellerin the past, with his own living features in the countenance of his horriblegreat-great-great-grandfather.

Ward brought his parents to see the marvel he had uncovered, and his father atonce determined to purchase the picture despite its execution on stationary panelling. Theresemblance to the boy, despite an appearance of rather greater age, was marvellous; and it couldbe seen that through some trick of atavism the physical contours of Joseph Curwen had found preciseduplication after a century and a half. Mrs. Ward’s resemblance to her ancestor was not atall marked, though she could recall relatives who had some of the facial characteristics shared byher son and by the bygone Curwen. She did not relish the discovery, and told her husband that hehad better burn the picture instead of bringing it home. There was, she averred, somethingunwholesome 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 millsat Riverpoint in the Pawtuxet Valley—and not one to listen to feminine scruples. The pictureimpressed him mightily with its likeness to his son, and he believed the boy deserved it as apresent. In this opinion, it is needless to say, Charles most heartily concurred; and a few dayslater Mr. Ward located the owner of the house—a small rodent-featured person with a gutturalaccent—and obtained the whole mantel and overmantel bearing the picture at a curtly fixedpriced which cut short the impending torrent of unctuous haggling.

It now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward home, whereprovisions were made for its thorough restoration and installation with an electric mock-fireplacein Charles’s third-floor study or library. To Charles was left the task of superintendingthis removal, and on the twenty-eighth of August he accompanied two expert workmen from the Crookerdecorating firm to the house in Olney Court, where the mantel and portrait-bearing overmantel weredetached with great care and precision for transportation in the company’s motor truck. Therewas left a space of exposed brickwork marking the chimney’s course, and in this young Wardobserved a cubical recess about a foot square, which must have lain directly behind the head of theportrait. Curious as to what such a space might mean or contain, the youth approached and lookedwithin; 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 therest together. Blowing away the bulk of the dirt and cinders, he took up the book and looked at thebold inscription on its cover. It was in a hand which he had learned to recognise at the EssexInstitute, and proclaimed the volume as the “Journall and Notes of Jos: Curwen, Gent., ofProvidence-Plantations, Late of Salem.”

Excited beyond measure by his discovery, Ward shewed the book to the two curiousworkmen 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 hebegan 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 ShalCome After, & How He May Gett Beyonde Time & y e Spheres.” Another was in a cipher; the same, Ward hoped, as the Hutchinson cipher whichhad hitherto baffled him. A third, and here the searcher rejoiced, seemed to be a key to thecipher; whilst the fourth and fifth were addressed respectively to “Edw: Hutchinson,Armiger” and “Jedediah Orne, Esq.”, “or Their Heir or Heirs, or ThoseRepresent’g Them”. The sixth and last was inscribed: “Joseph Curwen his Lifeand Travells Bet’n y e yeares 1678 and 1687: Of Whither HeVoyag’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 alienistsdate Charles Ward’s madness. Upon his discovery the youth had looked immediately at a few ofthe inner pages of the book and manuscripts, and had evidently seen something which impressed himtremendously. Indeed, in shewing the titles to the workmen he appeared to guard the text itselfwith peculiar care, and to labour under a perturbation for which even the antiquarian andgenealogical significance of the find could hardly account. Upon returning home he broke the newswith an almost embarrassed air, as if he wished to convey an idea of its supreme importance withouthaving to exhibit the evidence itself. He did not even shew the titles to his parents, but simplytold them that he had found some documents in Joseph Curwen’s handwriting, “mostly incipher”, 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 theirunconcealed curiosity. As it was he doubtless wished to avoid any display of peculiar reticencewhich 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 seewhat was amiss, were sent up to him; and in the afternoon he appeared only briefly when the mencame to install the Curwen picture and mantelpiece in his study. The next night he slept insnatches in his clothes, meanwhile wrestling feverishly with the unravelling of the ciphermanuscript. In the morning his mother saw that he was at work on the photostatic copy of theHutchinson cipher, which he had frequently shewn her before; but in response to her query he saidthat the Curwen key could not be applied to it. That afternoon he abandoned his work and watchedthe men fascinatedly as they finished their installation of the picture with its woodwork above acleverly realistic electric log, setting the mock-fireplace and overmantel a little out from thenorth wall as if a chimney existed, and boxing in the sides with panelling to match theroom’s. The front panel holding the picture was sawn and hinged to allow cupboard spacebehind it. After the workmen went he moved his work into the study and sat down before it with hiseyes half on the cipher and half on the portrait which stared back at him like a year-adding andcentury-recalling mirror.

His parents, subsequently recalling his conduct at this period, give interestingdetails anent the policy of concealment which he practiced. Before servants he seldom hid any paperwhich he might be studying, since he rightly assumed that Curwen’s intricate and archaicchirography would be too much for them. With his parents, however, he was more circ*mspect; andunless the manuscript in question were a cipher, or a mere mass of cryptic symbols and unknownideographs (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 thepapers under lock and key in an antique cabinet of his, where he also placed them whenever he leftthe room. He soon resumed fairly regular hours and habits, except that his long walks and otheroutside 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 withcollege. He had, he said, important special investigations to make, which would provide him withmore avenues toward knowledge and the humanities than any university which the world couldboast.

Naturally, only one who had always been more or less studious, eccentric, andsolitary could have pursued this course for many days without attracting notice. Ward, however, wasconstitutionally a scholar and a hermit; hence his parents were less surprised than regretful atthe close confinement and secrecy he adopted. At the same time, both his father and mother thoughtit odd that he would shew them no scrap of his treasure-trove, nor give any connected account ofsuch data as he had deciphered. This reticence he explained away as due to a wish to wait until hemight announce some connected revelation, but as the weeks passed without further disclosures therebegan to grow up between the youth and his family a kind of constraint; intensified in hismother’s case by her manifest disapproval of all Curwen delvings.

During October Ward began visiting the libraries again, but no longer for theantiquarian matter of his former days. Witchcraft and magic, occultism and daemonology, were whathe sought now; and when Providence sources proved unfruitful he would take the train for Boston andtap the wealth of the great library in Copley Square, the Widener Library at Harvard, or the ZionResearch Library in Brookline, where certain rare works on Biblical subjects are available. Hebought extensively, and fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his study for newly acquiredworks on uncanny subjects; while during the Christmas holidays he made a round of out-of-town tripsincluding one to Salem to consult certain records at the Essex Institute.

About the middle of January, 1920, there entered Ward’s bearing an elementof 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 theone a laboratory in the unused attic of the house, and for the latter haunting all the sources ofvital 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 definiteobject of his second interest. He was searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of JosephCurwen, 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 waswrong. Charles had had freaks and changes of minor interests before, but this growing secrecy andabsorption in strange pursuits was unlike even him. His school work was the merest pretence; andalthough he failed in no test, it could be seen that the old application had all vanished. He hadother concernments now; and when not in his new laboratory with a score of obsolete alchemicalbooks, could be found either poring over old burial records down town or glued to his volumes ofoccult lore in his study, where the startlingly—one almost fancied increasingly—similarfeatures 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 ramblesabout the various ancient cemeteries of the city. The cause appeared later, when it was learnedfrom City Hall clerks that he had probably found an important clue. His quest had suddenly shiftedfrom 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 fragmentaryrecord of Curwen’s burial which had escaped the general obliteration, and which stated thatthe curious leaden coffin had been interred “10 ft. S. and 5 ft. W. of NaphthaliField’s grave in y e —”. The lack of a specifiedburying-ground in the surviving entry greatly complicated the search, and Naphthali Field’sgrave seemed as elusive as that of Curwen; but here no systematic effacement had existed, and onemight reasonably be expected to stumble on the stone itself even if its record had perished. Hencethe rambles—from which St. John’s (the former King’s) Churchyard and the ancientCongregational burying-ground in the midst of Swan Point Cemetery were excluded, since otherstatistics had shewn that the only Naphthali Field (obiit 1729) whose grave could have been meanthad been a Baptist.

It was toward May when Dr. Willett, at the request of the senior Ward, andfortified with all the Curwen data which the family had gleaned from Charles in his non-secretivedays, talked with the young man. The interview was of little value or conclusiveness, for Willettfelt at every moment that Charles was thoroughly master of himself and in touch with matters ofreal importance; but it at least forced the secretive youth to offer some rational explanation ofhis recent demeanour. Of a pallid, impassive type not easily shewing embarrassment, Ward seemedquite ready to discuss his pursuits, though not to reveal their object. He stated that the papersof his ancestor had contained some remarkable secrets of early scientific knowledge, for the mostpart in cipher, of an apparent scope comparable only to the discoveries of Friar Bacon and perhapssurpassing even those. They were, however, meaningless except when correlated with a body oflearning now wholly obsolete; so that their immediate presentation to a world equipped only withmodern science would rob them of all impressiveness and dramatic significance. To take their vividplace in the history of human thought they must first be correlated by one familiar with thebackground out of which they evolved, and to this task of correlation Ward was now devotinghimself. He was seeking to acquire as fast as possible those neglected arts of old which a trueinterpreter of the Curwen data must possess, and hoped in time to make a full announcement andpresentation of the utmost interest to mankind and to the world of thought. Not even Einstein, hedeclared, could more profoundly revolutionise the current conception of things.

As to his graveyard search, whose object he freely admitted, but the details ofwhose progress he did not relate, he said he had reason to think that Joseph Curwen’smutilated headstone bore certain mystic symbols—carved from directions in his will andignorantly spared by those who had effaced the name—which were absolutely essential to thefinal solution of his cryptic system. Curwen, he believed, had wished to guard his secret withcare; and had consequently distributed the data in an exceedingly curious fashion. When Dr. Willettasked to see the mystic documents, Ward displayed much reluctance and tried to put him off withsuch things as photostatic copies of the Hutchinson cipher and Orne formulae and diagrams; butfinally shewed him the exteriors of some of the real Curwen finds—the “Journall andNotes”, the cipher (title in cipher also), and the formula-filled message “ToHim Who Shal Come After” —and let him glance inside such as were in obscurecharacters.

He also opened the diary at a page carefully selected for its innocuousness andgave Willett a glimpse of Curwen’s connected handwriting in English. The doctor noted veryclosely the crabbed and complicated letters, and the general aura of the seventeenth century whichclung round both penmanship and style despite the writer’s survival into the eighteenthcentury, and became quickly certain that the document was genuine. The text itself was relativelytrivial, and Willett recalled only a fragment:

When upon reaching this point Dr. Willett turned the leaf he was quickly checkedby Ward, who almost snatched the book from his grasp. All that the doctor had a chance to see onthe newly opened page was a brief pair of sentences; but these, strangely enough, lingeredtenaciously in his memory. They ran: “Ye Verse from Liber-Damnatus be’g spoke VRoodmasses and IV Hallows-Eves, I am Hopeful y e Thing isbreed’g Outside y e Spheres. It will drawe One who is toCome, if I can make sure he shal bee, and he shall think on Past thinges and look back thro’all y e yeares, against y e which Imust have ready y e Saltes or That to make ’emwith.”

Willett saw no more, but somehow this small glimpse gave a new and vague terror tothe painted features of Joseph Curwen which stared blandly down from the overmantel. Ever afterthat he entertained the odd fancy—which his medical skill of course assured him was only afancy—that the eyes of the portrait had a sort of wish, if not an actual tendency, to followyoung Charles Ward as he moved about the room. He stopped before leaving to study the pictureclosely, marvelling at its resemblance to Charles and memorising every minute detail of thecryptical, colourless face, even down to a slight scar or pit in the smooth brow above the righteye. Cosmo Alexander, he decided, was a painter worthy of the Scotland that produced Raeburn, and ateacher worthy of his illustrious pupil Gilbert Stuart.

Assured by the doctor that Charles’s mental health was in no danger, butthat on the other hand he was engaged in researches which might prove of real importance, the Wardswere more lenient than they might otherwise have been when during the following June the youth madepositive his refusal to attend college. He had, he declared, studies of much more vital importanceto pursue; and intimated a wish to go abroad the following year in order to avail himself ofcertain sources of data not existing in America. The senior Ward, while denying this latter wish asabsurd for a boy of only eighteen, acquiesced regarding the university; so that after a none toobrilliant graduation from the Moses Brown School there ensued for Charles a three-year period ofintensive occult study and graveyard searching. He became recognised as an eccentric, and droppedeven more completely from the sight of his family’s friends than he had been before; keepingclose to his work and only occasionally making trips to other cities to consult obscure records.Once he went south to talk with a strange old mulatto who dwelt in a swamp and about whom anewspaper had printed a curious article. Again he sought a small village in the Adirondacks whencereports of certain odd ceremonial practices had come. But still his parents forbade him the trip tothe Old World which he desired.

Coming of age in April, 1923, and having previously inherited a small competencefrom his maternal grandfather, Ward determined at last to take the European trip hitherto deniedhim. Of his proposed itinerary he would say nothing save that the needs of his studies would carryhim to many places, but he promised to write his parents fully and faithfully. When they saw hecould not be dissuaded, they ceased all opposition and helped as best they could; so that in Junethe young man sailed for Liverpool with the farewell blessings of his father and mother, whoaccompanied 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 resourcesof the British Museum in a certain direction. Of his daily life he wrote but little, for there waslittle to write. Study and experiment consumed all his time, and he mentioned a laboratory which hehad established in one of his rooms. That he said nothing of antiquarian rambles in the glamorousold city with its luring skyline of ancient domes and steeples and its tangles of roads and alleyswhose mystic convolutions and sudden vistas alternately beckon and surprise, was taken by hisparents 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 hadbefore made one or two flying trips for material in the Bibliothèque Nationale. For three monthsthereafter he sent only postal cards, giving an address in the Rue St. Jacques and referring to aspecial search among rare manuscripts in the library of an unnamed private collector. He avoidedacquaintances, and no tourists brought back reports of having seen him. Then came a silence, and inOctober the Wards received a picture card from Prague, Czecho-Slovakia, stating that Charles was inthat ancient town for the purpose of conferring with a certain very aged man supposed to be thelast living possessor of some very curious mediaeval information. He gave an address in theNeustadt, and announced no move till the following January; when he dropped several cards fromVienna telling of his passage through that city on the way toward a more easterly region whitherone of his correspondents and fellow-delvers into the occult had invited him.

The next card was from Klausenburg in Transylvania, and told of Ward’sprogress toward his destination. He was going to visit a Baron Ferenczy, whose estate lay in themountains east of Rakus; and was to be addressed at Rakus in the care of that nobleman. Anothercard from Rakus a week later, saying that his host’s carriage had met him and that he wasleaving the village for the mountains, was his last message for a considerable time; indeed, he didnot reply to his parents’ frequent letters until May, when he wrote to discourage the plan ofhis mother for a meeting in London, Paris, or Rome during the summer, when the elder Wards wereplanning to travel in Europe. His researches, he said, were such that he could not leave hispresent quarters; while the situation of Baron Ferenczy’s castle did not favour visits. Itwas on a crag in the dark wooded mountains, and the region was so shunned by the country folk thatnormal people could not help feeling ill at ease. Moreover, the Baron was not a person likely toappeal to correct and conservative New England gentlefolk. His aspect and manners hadidiosyncrasies, and his age was so great as to be disquieting. It would be better, Charles said, ifhis 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 fewheralding cards the young wanderer quietly slipped into New York on the Homeric andtraversed the long miles to Providence by motor-coach, eagerly drinking in the green rolling hills,the fragrant, blossoming orchards, and the white steepled towns of vernal Connecticut; his firsttaste of ancient New England in nearly four years. When the coach crossed the Pawcatuck and enteredRhode Island amidst the faery goldenness of a late spring afternoon his heart beat with quickenedforce, and the entry to Providence along Reservoir and Elmwood avenues was a breathless andwonderful thing despite the depths of forbidden lore to which he had delved. At the high squarewhere Broad, Weybosset, and Empire Streets join, he saw before and below him in the fire of sunsetthe pleasant, remembered houses and domes and steeples of the old town; and his head swam curiouslyas the vehicle rolled down to the terminal behind the Biltmore, bringing into view the great domeand soft, roof-pierced greenery of the ancient hill across the river, and the tall colonial spireof the First Baptist Church limned pink in the magic evening light against the fresh springtimeverdure 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 marvelsand secrets whose boundaries no prophet might fix. Here lay the arcana, wondrous or dreadful as thecase might be, for which all his years of travel and application had been preparing him. A taxicabwhirled him through Post Office Square with its glimpse of the river, the old Market House, and thehead of the bay, and up the steep curved slope of Waterman Street to Prospect, where the vastgleaming 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 bricksidewalks so often trodden by his youthful feet. And at last the little white overtaken farmhouseon the right, on the left the classic Adam porch and stately bayed facade of the great brick housewhere he was born. It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home.

A school of alienists slightly less academic than Dr. Lyman’s assign toWard’s European trip the beginning of his true madness. Admitting that he was sane when hestarted, they believe that his conduct upon returning implies a disastrous change. But even to thisclaim Dr. Willett refuses to accede. There was, he insists, something later; and the queernesses ofthe youth at this stage he attributes to the practice of rituals learned abroad—odd enoughthings, to be sure, but by no means implying mental aberration on the part of their celebrant. Wardhimself, though visibly aged and hardened, was still normal in his general reactions; and inseveral talks with Willett displayed a balance which no madman—even an incipientone—could feign continuously for long. What elicited the notion of insanity at this periodwere the sounds heard at all hours from Ward’s attic laboratory, in which he kepthimself most of the time. There were chantings and repetitions, and thunderous declamations inuncanny rhythms; and although these sounds were always in Ward’s own voice, there wassomething in the quality of that voice, and in the accents of the formulae it pronounced, whichcould not but chill the blood of every hearer. It was noticed that Nig, the venerable and belovedblack cat of the household, bristled and arched his back perceptibly when certain of the tones wereheard.

The odours occasionally wafted from the laboratory were likewise exceedinglystrange. 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 smelledthem had a tendency to glimpse momentary mirages of enormous vistas, with strange hills or endlessavenues of sphinxes and hippogriffs stretching off into infinite distance. Ward did not resume hisold-time rambles, but applied himself diligently to the strange books he had brought home, and toequally strange delvings within his quarters; explaining that European sources had greatly enlargedthe possibilities of his work, and promising great revelations in the years to come. His olderaspect increased to a startling degree his resemblance to the Curwen portrait in his library; andDr. Willett would often pause by the latter after a call, marvelling at the virtual identity, andreflecting that only the small pit above the picture’s right eye now remained todifferentiate 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 thedoctor, 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 ortables, and the half-erased remnants of circles, triangles, and pentagrams in chalk or charcoal onthe cleared central space of the large room. And always in the night those rhythms and incantationsthundered, till it became very difficult to keep servants or suppress furtive talk ofCharles’s madness.

In January, 1927, a peculiar incident occurred. One night about midnight, asCharles 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 earthwhich everyone in the neighbourhood noted. At the same time the cat exhibited phenomenal traces offright, while dogs bayed for as much as a mile around. This was the prelude to a sharpthunderstorm, anomalous for the season, which brought with it such a crash that Mr. and Mrs. Wardbelieved the house had been struck. They rushed upstairs to see what damage had been done, butCharles met them at the door to the attic; pale, resolute, and portentous, with an almost fearsomecombination of triumph and seriousness on his face. He assured them that the house had not reallybeen struck, and that the storm would soon be over. They paused, and looking through a window sawthat he was indeed right; for the lightning flashed farther and farther off, whilst the treesceased to bend in the strange frigid gust from the water. The thunder sank to a sort of dullmumbling chuckle and finally died away. Stars came out, and the stamp of triumph on CharlesWard’s face crystallised into a very singular expression.

For two months or more after this incident Ward was less confined than usual tohis laboratory. He exhibited a curious interest in the weather, and made odd inquiries about thedate 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 drawup to the carriage entrance. Muffled oaths could be distinguished, and Mrs. Ward, rising and goingto the window, saw four dark figures removing a long, heavy box from a truck at Charles’sdirection and carrying it within by the side door. She heard laboured breathing and ponderousfootfalls on the stairs, and finally a dull thumping in the attic; after which the footfallsdescended again, and the four men reappeared outside and drove off in their truck.

The next day Charles resumed his strict attic seclusion, drawing down the darkshades of his laboratory windows and appearing to be working on some metal substance. He would openthe door to no one, and steadfastly refused all proffered food. About noon a wrenching soundfollowed by a terrible cry and a fall were heard, but when Mrs. Ward rapped at the door her son atlength answered faintly, and told her that nothing had gone amiss. The hideous and indescribablestench now welling out was absolutely harmless and unfortunately necessary. Solitude was the oneprime essential, and he would appear later for dinner. That afternoon, after the conclusion of someodd hissing sounds which came from behind the locked portal, he did finally appear; wearing anextremely 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 personpermitted to visit either the mysterious garret workroom or the adjacent storeroom which he cleanedout, furnished roughly, and added to his inviolably private domain as a sleeping apartment. Here helived, with books brought up from his library beneath, till the time he purchased the Pawtuxetbungalow and moved to it all his scientific effects.

In the evening Charles secured the paper before the rest of the family and damagedpart of it through an apparent accident. Later on Dr. Willett, having fixed the date fromstatements by various members of the household, looked up an intact copy at the Journaloffice 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 severalmen with a motor truck in the oldest part of the cemetery, but apparently frightened them offbefore they had accomplished whatever their object may have been.

The discovery took place at about four o’clock, when Hart’s attentionwas attracted by the sound of a motor outside his shelter. Investigating, he saw a large truck onthe main drive several rods away; but could not reach it before the sound of his feet on the gravelhad revealed his approach. The men hastily placed a large box in the truck and drove away towardthe street before they could be overtaken; and since no known grave was disturbed, Hart believesthat this box was an object which they wished to bury.

The diggers must have been at work for a long while before detection, for Hartfound an enormous hole dug at a considerable distance back from the roadway in the lot of AmasaField, where most of the old stones have long ago disappeared. The hole, a place as large and deepas a grave, was empty; and did not coincide with any interment mentioned in the cemeteryrecords.

Sergt. Riley of the Second Station viewed the spot and gave the opinion that thehole was dug by bootleggers rather gruesomely and ingeniously seeking a safe cache for liquor in aplace not likely to be disturbed. In reply to questions Hart said he thought the escaping truck hadheaded up Rochambeau Avenue, though he could not be sure.

During the next few days Ward was seldom seen by his family. Having added sleepingquarters to his attic realm, he kept closely to himself there, ordering food brought to the doorand not taking it in until after the servant had gone away. The droning of monotonous formulae andthe chanting of bizarre rhythms recurred at intervals, while at other times occasional listenerscould 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 thedoor; and the air of tension observable in the young recluse whenever he did venture briefly forthwas such as to excite the keenest speculation. Once he made a hasty trip to the Athenaeum for abook 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. Willettconfessed themselves wholly at a loss what to do or think about it.

Then on the fifteenth of April a strange development occurred. While nothingappeared to grow different in kind, there was certainly a very terrible difference in degree; andDr. Willett somehow attaches great significance to the change. The day was Good Friday, acirc*mstance of which the servants made much, but which others quite naturally dismiss as anirrelevant coincidence. Late in the afternoon young Ward began repeating a certain formula in asingularly loud voice, at the same time burning some substance so pungent that its fumes escapedover the entire house. The formula was so plainly audible in the hall outside the locked door thatMrs. Ward could not help memorising it as she waited and listened anxiously, and later on she wasable 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 “EliphasLevi”, that cryptic soul who crept through a crack in the forbidden door and glimpsed thefrightful vistas of the void beyond:

This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission when over allthe neighbourhood a pandaemoniac howling of dogs set in. The extent of this howling can be judgedfrom the space it received in the papers the next day, but to those in the Ward household it wasovershadowed by the odour which instantly followed it; a hideous, all-pervasive odour which none ofthem had ever smelt before or have ever smelt since. In the midst of this mephitic flood there camea very perceptible flash like that of lightning, which would have been blinding and impressive butfor the daylight around; and then was heard the voice that no listener can ever forgetbecause of its thunderous remoteness, its incredible depth, and its eldritch dissimilarity toCharles Ward’s voice. It shook the house, and was clearly heard by at least two neighboursabove the howling of the dogs. Mrs. Ward, who had been listening in despair outside her son’slocked laboratory, shivered as she recognised its hellish import; for Charles had told her of itsevil fame in dark books, and of the manner in which it had thundered, according to the Fennerletters, 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 olddays when he had talked frankly of his Curwen investigations. And yet it was only this fragment ofan 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 firstbut equally unknown and intolerable. Charles was chanting again now and his mother could hearsyllables that sounded like “Yi-nash-Yog-Sothoth-he-lgeb-fi-throdog”—ending in a“Yah!” whose maniacal force mounted in an ear-splitting crescendo. A second later allprevious memories were effaced by the wailing scream which burst out with frantic explosiveness andgradually changed form to a paroxysm of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Mrs. Ward, with themingled fear and blind courage of maternity, advanced and knocked affrightedly at the concealingpanels, but obtained no sign of recognition. She knocked again, but paused nervelessly as a secondshriek arose, this one unmistakably in the familiar voice of her son, and sounding concurrentlywith the still bursting cachinnations of that other voice. Presently she fainted, although sheis still unable to recall the precise and immediate cause. Memory sometimes makes mercifuldeletions.

Mr. Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past six; and notfinding his wife downstairs, was told by the frightened servants that she was probably watching atCharles’s door, from which the sounds had been far stranger than ever before. Mounting thestairs at once, he saw Mrs. Ward stretched at full length on the floor of the corridor outside thelaboratory; and realising that she had fainted, hastened to fetch a glass of water from a set bowlin a neighbouring alcove. Dashing the cold fluid in her face, he was heartened to observe animmediate response on her part, and was watching the bewildered opening of her eyes when a chillshot through him and threatened to reduce him to the very state from which she was emerging. Forthe seemingly silent laboratory was not as silent as it had appeared to be, but held the murmurs ofa tense, muffled conversation in tones too low for comprehension, yet of a quality profoundlydisturbing to the soul.

It was not, of course, new for Charles to mutter formulae; but this muttering wasdefinitely different. It was so palpably a dialogue, or imitation of a dialogue, with the regularalteration of inflections suggesting question and answer, statement and response. One voice wasundisguisedly that of Charles, but the other had a depth and hollowness which the youth’sbest 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 hismind by arousing his protective instincts it is not likely that Theodore Howland Ward could havemaintained for nearly a year more his old boast that he had never fainted. As it was, he seized hiswife in his arms and bore her quickly downstairs before she could notice the voices which had sohorribly disturbed him. Even so, however, he was not quick enough to escape catching somethinghimself which caused him to stagger dangerously with his burden. For Mrs. Ward’s cry hadevidently been heard by others than he, and there had come from behind the locked door the firstdistinguishable words which that masked and terrible colloquy had yielded. They were merely anexcited caution in Charles’s own voice, but somehow their implications held a nameless frightfor 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 resolvedto 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 ofsanity and formed a menace to the order and nervous well-being of the entire household. The youthmust indeed have taken complete leave of his senses, since only downright madness could haveprompted the wild screams and imaginary conversations in assumed voices which the present day hadbrought forth. All this must be stopped, or Mrs. Ward would be made ill and the keeping of servantsbecome an impossibility.

Mr. Ward rose at the close of the meal and started upstairs for Charles’slaboratory. On the third floor, however, he paused at the sounds which he heard proceeding from thenow 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 armfulof literary matter of every size and shape. Charles’s aspect was very drawn and haggard, andhe dropped his entire load with a start at the sound of his father’s voice. At the elderman’s command he sat down, and for some time listened to the admonitions he had so longdeserved. There was no scene. At the end of the lecture he agreed that his father was right, andthat his noises, mutterings, incantations, and chemical odours were indeed inexcusable nuisances.He agreed to a policy of greater 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 obtainquarters elsewhere for any such vocal rituals as might be necessary at a later stage. For thefright and fainting of his mother he expressed the keenest contrition, and explained that theconversation later heard was part of an elaborate symbolism designed to create a certain mentalatmosphere. His use of abstruse technical terms somewhat bewildered Mr. Ward, but the partingimpression was one of undeniable sanity and poise despite a mysterious tension of the utmostgravity. The interview was really quite inconclusive, and as Charles picked up his armful and leftthe room Mr. Ward hardly knew what to make of the entire business. It was as mysterious as thedeath of poor old Nig, whose stiffening form had been found an hour before in the basem*nt, withstaring eyes and fear-distorted mouth.

Driven by some vague detective instinct, the bewildered parent now glancedcuriously at the vacant shelves to see what his son had taken up to the attic. The youth’slibrary was plainly and rigidly classified, so that one might tell at a glance the books or atleast the kind of books which had been withdrawn. On this occasion Mr. Ward was astonished to findthat nothing of the occult or the antiquarian, beyond what had been previously removed, wasmissing. These new withdrawals were all modern items; histories, scientific treatises, geographies,manuals of literature, philosophic works, and certain contemporary newspapers and magazines. It wasa very curious shift from Charles Ward’s recent run of reading, and the father paused in agrowing vortex of perplexity and an engulfing sense of strangeness. The strangeness was a verypoignant sensation, and almost clawed at his chest as he strove to see just what was wrong aroundhim. Something was indeed wrong, and tangibly as well as spiritually so. Ever since he had been inthis 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 OlneyCourt, but to the cracked and precariously restored oils of the large Curwen portrait disaster hadcome. Time and unequal heating had done their work at last, and at some time since the room’slast cleaning the worst had happened. Peeling clear of the wood, curling tighter and tighter, andfinally crumbling into small bits with what must have been malignly silent suddenness, the portraitof Joseph Curwen had resigned forever its staring surveillance of the youth it so strangelyresembled, and now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.

IV. A Mutation and a Madness

In the week following that memorable Good Friday Charles Ward was seen more often than usual, andwas continually carrying books between his library and the attic laboratory. His actions were quietand rational, but he had a furtive, hunted look which his mother did not like, and developed anincredibly ravenous appetite as gauged by his demands upon the cook. Dr. Willett had been told ofthose Friday noises and happenings, and on the following Tuesday had a long conversation with theyouth 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 outpromises of an early revelation, and spoke of the need of securing a laboratory elsewhere. At theloss of the portrait he grieved singularly little considering his first enthusiasm over it, butseemed 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 hisfrequent visits to the old house in Olney Court, where he would come with a large valise andperform curious delvings in the cellar. He was always very liberal to her and to old Asa, butseemed more worried than he used to be; which grieved her very much, since she had watched him growup from birth. Another report of his doings came from Pawtuxet, where some friends of the familysaw him at a distance a surprising number of times. He seemed to haunt the resort and canoe-houseof Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, and subsequent inquiries by Dr. Willett at that place brought out thefact that his purpose was always to secure access to the rather hedged-in river-bank, along whichhe 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 laboratorywhich brought a stern reproof from Mr. Ward and a somewhat distracted promise of amendment fromCharles. It occurred one morning, and seemed to form a resumption of the imaginary conversationnoted on that turbulent Good Friday. The youth was arguing or remonstrating hotly with himself, forthere suddenly burst forth a perfectly distinguishable series of clashing shouts in differentiatedtones like alternate demands and denials which caused Mrs. Ward to run upstairs and listen at thedoor. She could hear no more than a fragment whose only plain words were “must have it redfor three months”, and upon her knocking all sounds ceased at once. When Charles was laterquestioned by his father he said that there were certain conflicts of spheres of consciousnesswhich 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 eveningthere had been some noise and thumping in the laboratory upstairs, and Mr. Ward was on the point ofinvestigating when it suddenly quieted down. That midnight, after the family had retired, thebutler was nightlocking the front door when according to his statement Charles appeared somewhatblunderingly and uncertainly at the foot of the stairs with a large suitcase and made signs that hewished egress. The youth spoke no word, but the worthy Yorkshireman caught one sight of his feveredeyes and trembled causelessly. He opened the door and young Ward went out, but in the morning hepresented his resignation to Mrs. Ward. There was, he said, something unholy in the glance Charleshad fixed on him. It was no way for a young gentleman to look at an honest person, and he could notpossibly stay another night. Mrs. Ward allowed the man to depart, but she did not value hisstatement highly. To fancy Charles in a savage state that night was quite ridiculous, for as longas she had remained awake she had heard faint sounds from the laboratory above; sounds as if ofsobbing 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 fastdriving all else from her mind.

The next evening, much as on another evening nearly three months before, CharlesWard seized the newspaper very early and accidentally lost the main section. The matter was notrecalled till later, when Dr. Willett began checking up loose ends and searching out missing linkshere and there. In the Journal office he found the section which Charles had lost, andmarked 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, thatghouls were again at work in the ancient portion of the cemetery. The grave of Ezra Weeden, who wasborn 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 adjacenttool-shed.

Whatever the contents may have been after more than a century of burial, all wasgone except a few slivers of decayed wood. There were no wheel tracks, but the police have measureda single set of footprints which they found in the vicinity, and which indicate the boots of a manof 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. Rileyof the Second Station discounts this theory and points to vital differences in the two cases. InMarch the digging had been in a spot where no grave was known; but this time a well-marked andcared-for grave had been rifled with every evidence of deliberate purpose, and with a consciousmalignity expressed in the splintering of the slab which had been intact up to the daybefore.

Members of the Weeden family, notified of the happening, expressed theirastonishment and regret; and were wholly unable to think of any enemy who would care to violate thegrave of their ancestor. Hazard Weeden of 598 Angell Street recalls a family legend according towhich Ezra Weeden was involved in some very peculiar circ*mstances, not dishonourable to himself,shortly before the Revolution; but of any modern feud or mystery he is frankly ignorant. InspectorCunningham has been assigned to the case, and hopes to uncover some valuable clues in the nearfuture.

Dogs Noisy in Pawtuxet

Residents of Pawtuxet were aroused about 3 a.m. today by a phenomenal baying ofdogs which seemed to centre near the river just north of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet. The volume andquality of the howling were unusually odd, according to most who heard it; and Fred Lemdin, nightwatchman at Rhodes, declares it was mixed with something very like the shrieks of a man in mortalterror and agony. A sharp and very brief thunderstorm, which seemed to strike somewhere near thebank of the river, put an end to the disturbance. Strange and unpleasant odours, probably from theoil tanks along the bay, are popularly linked with this incident; and may have had their share inexciting the dogs.

The aspect of Charles now became very haggard and hunted, and all agreed inretrospect that he may have wished at this period to make some statement or confession from whichsheer terror withheld him. The morbid listening of his mother in the night brought out the factthat he made frequent sallies abroad under cover of darkness, and most of the more academicalienists unite at present in charging him with the revolting cases of vampirism which the press sosensationally reported about this time, but which have not yet been definitely traced to any knownperpetrator. These cases, too recent and celebrated to need detailed mention, involved victims ofevery age and type and seemed to cluster around two distinct localities; the residential hill andthe North End, near the Ward home, and the suburban districts across the Cranston line nearPawtuxet. Both late wayfarers and sleepers with open windows were attacked, and those who lived totell the tale spoke unanimously of a lean, lithe, leaping monster with burning eyes which fastenedits 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 eventhis, is cautious in attempting to explain these horrors. He has, he declares, certain theories ofhis own; and limits his positive statements to a peculiar kind of negation. “I willnot”, he says, “state who or what I believe perpetrated these attacks and murders, butI will declare that Charles Ward was innocent of them. I have reason to be sure he was ignorant ofthe taste of blood, as indeed his continued anaemic decline and increasing pallor prove better thanany verbal argument. Ward meddled with terrible things, but he has paid for it, and he was never amonster or a villain. As for now—I don’t like to think. A change came, and I’mcontent to believe that the old Charles Ward died with it. His soul did, anyhow, for that mad fleshthat 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 morbidhallucinations which she confided to the doctor with hesitancy, and which he ridiculed in talkingto her, although they made him ponder deeply when alone. These delusions always concerned the faintsounds which she fancied she heard in the attic laboratory and bedroom, and emphasised theoccurrence of muffled sighs and sobbings at the most impossible times. Early in July Willettordered 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 thisenforced and reluctant escape that she owes her life and continued sanity.

Not long after his mother’s departure Charles Ward began negotiating for thePawtuxet bungalow. It was a squalid little wooden edifice with a concrete garage, perched high onthe sparsely settled bank of the river slightly above Rhodes, but for some odd reason the youthwould have nothing else. He gave the real-estate agencies no peace till one of them secured it forhim at an exorbitant price from a somewhat reluctant owner, and as soon as it was vacant he tookpossession under cover of darkness, transporting in a great closed van the entire contents of hisattic 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 realisationof stifled oaths and stamping feet on the night the goods were taken away. After that Charles movedback 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 hadsurrounded his attic realm, save that he now appeared to have two sharers of his mysteries; avillainous-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 whosestatus was evidently that of a colleague. Neighbours vainly tried to engage these odd persons inconversation. The mulatto Gomes spoke very little English, and the bearded man, who gave his nameas Dr. Allen, voluntarily followed his example. Ward himself tried to be more affable, butsucceeded only in provoking curiosity with his rambling accounts of chemical research. Before longqueer tales began to circulate regarding the all-night burning of lights; and somewhat later, afterthis burning had suddenly ceased, there rose still queerer tales of disproportionate orders of meatfrom the butcher’s and of the muffled shouting, declamation, rhythmic chanting, and screamingsupposed to come from some very deep cellar below the place. Most distinctly the new and strangehousehold was bitterly disliked by the honest bourgeoisie of the vicinity, and it is not remarkablethat dark hints were advanced connecting the hated establishment with the current epidemic ofvampiristic attacks and murders; especially since the radius of that plague seemed now confinedwholly to Pawtuxet and the adjacent streets of Edgewood.

Ward spent most of his time at the bungalow, but slept occasionally at home andwas still reckoned a dweller beneath his father’s roof. Twice he was absent from the city onweek-long trips, whose destinations have not yet been discovered. He grew steadily paler and moreemaciated even than before, and lacked some of his former assurance when repeating to Dr. Willetthis old, old story of vital research and future revelations. Willett often waylaid him at hisfather’s house, for the elder Ward was deeply worried and perplexed, and wished his son toget as much sound oversight as could be managed in the case of so secretive and independent anadult. The doctor still insists that the youth was sane even as late as this, and adduces many aconversation to prove his point.

About September the vampirism declined, but in the following January Ward almostbecame involved in serious trouble. For some time the nocturnal arrival and departure of motortrucks at the Pawtuxet bungalow had been commented upon, and at this juncture an unforeseen hitchexposed the nature of at least one item of their contents. In a lonely spot near Hope Valley hadoccurred one of the frequent sordid waylayings of trucks by “hi-jackers” in quest ofliquor shipments, but this time the robbers had been destined to receive the greater shock. For thelong cases they seized proved upon opening to contain some exceedingly gruesome things; sogruesome, 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 thematter a careful search was made. A recently arrested vagrant, under promise of immunity fromprosecution 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 forthe national—or even the international—sense of decorum if the public were ever to knowwhat was uncovered by that awestruck party. There was no mistaking it, even by these far fromstudious officers; and telegrams to Washington ensued with feverish rapidity.

The cases were addressed to Charles Ward at his Pawtuxet bungalow, and State andFederal officials at once paid him a very forceful and serious call. They found him pallid andworried with his two odd companions, and received from him what seemed to be a valid explanationand evidence of innocence. He had needed certain anatomical specimens as part of a programme ofresearch whose depth and genuineness anyone who had known him in the last decade could prove, andhad ordered the required kind and number from agencies which he had thought as reasonablylegitimate as such things can be. Of the identity of the specimens he had known absolutelynothing, and was properly shocked when the inspectors hinted at the monstrous effect on publicsentiment and national dignity which a knowledge of the matter would produce. In this statement hewas firmly sustained by his bearded colleague Dr. Allen, whose oddly hollow voice carried even moreconviction than his own nervous tones; so that in the end the officials took no action, butcarefully set down the New York name and address which Ward gave them as a basis for a search whichcame to nothing. It is only fair to add that the specimens were quickly and quietly restored totheir proper places, and that the general public will never know of their blasphemousdisturbance.

On February 9, 1928, Dr. Willett received a letter from Charles Ward which heconsiders 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 dementiapraecox, but Willett on the other hand regards it as the last perfectly sane utterance of thehapless youth. He calls especial attention to the normal character of the penmanship; which thoughshewing traces of shattered nerves, is nevertheless distinctly Ward’s own. The text in fullis as follows:

Dr. Willett received this note about 10:30 a.m., and immediately arranged to sparethe whole late afternoon and evening for the momentous talk, letting it extend on into the night aslong as might be necessary. He planned to arrive about four o’clock, and through all theintervening hours was so engulfed in every sort of wild speculation that most of his tasks werevery mechanically performed. Maniacal as the letter would have sounded to a stranger, Willett hadseen too much of Charles Ward’s oddities to dismiss it as sheer raving. That something verysubtle, ancient, and horrible was hovering about he felt quite sure, and the reference to Dr. Allencould almost be comprehended in view of what Pawtuxet gossip said of Ward’s enigmaticalcolleague. Willett had never seen the man, but had heard much of his aspect and bearing, and couldnot 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 tohis annoyance that Charles had not adhered to his determination to remain indoors. The guards werethere, but said that the young man seemed to have lost part of his timidity. He had that morningdone much apparently frightened arguing and protesting over the telephone, one of the detectivessaid, replying to some unknown voice with phrases such as “I am very tired and must rest awhile”, “I can’t receive anyone for some time, you’ll have to excuseme”, “Please postpone decisive action till we can arrange some sort ofcompromise”, 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 hadslipped out so quietly that no one had seen him depart or knew that he had gone until he returnedabout one o’clock and entered the house without a word. He had gone upstairs, where a bit ofhis fear must have surged back; for he was heard to cry out in a highly terrified fashion uponentering his library, afterward trailing off into a kind of choking gasp. When, however, the butlerhad gone to inquire what the trouble was, he had appeared at the door with a great show ofboldness, and had silently gestured the man away in a manner that terrified him unaccountably. Thenhe had evidently done some rearranging of his shelves, for a great clattering and thumping andcreaking ensued; after which he had reappeared and left at once. Willett inquired whether or notany message had been left, but was told that there was none. The butler seemed queerly disturbedabout something in Charles’s appearance and manner, and asked solicitously if there was muchhope 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 atthe panelled overmantel on the north wall, whence a year before the suave features of old JosephCurwen had looked mildly down. After a time the shadows began to gather, and the sunset cheer gaveplace 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 beentaken to guard him. He had not known of Charles’s appointment, and promised to notify Willettwhen the youth returned. In bidding the doctor goodnight he expressed his utter perplexity at hisson’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 hauntit; 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 madehim 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 thatCharles was still absent. Mr. Ward mentioned that Dr. Allen had telephoned him to say that Charleswould remain at Pawtuxet for some time, and that he must not be disturbed. This was necessarybecause Allen himself was suddenly called away for an indefinite period, leaving the researches inneed of Charles’s constant oversight. Charles sent his best wishes, and regretted any botherhis 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 whichcould 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 aloss what to do. The frantic earnestness of Charles’s note was not to be denied, yet whatcould one think of its writer’s immediate violation of his own expressed policy? Young Wardhad written that his delvings had become blasphemous and menacing, that they and his beardedcolleague must be extirpated at any cost, and that he himself would never return to their finalscene; yet according to latest advices he had forgotten all this and was back in the thick of themystery. Common sense bade one leave the youth alone with his freakishness, yet some deeperinstinct would not permit the impression of that frenzied letter to subside. Willett read it overagain, and could not make its essence sound as empty and insane as both its bombastic verbiage andits lack of fulfilment would seem to imply. Its terror was too profound and real, and inconjunction with what the doctor already knew evoked too vivid hints of monstrosities from beyondtime and space to permit of any cynical explanation. There were nameless horrors abroad; and nomatter how little one might be able to get at them, one ought to stand prepared for any sort ofaction 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 theyouth had ever ventured to storm this forbidden retreat, and even his father knew of its interioronly from such descriptions as he chose to give; but Willett felt that some direct conversationwith his patient was necessary. Mr. Ward had been receiving brief and non-committal typed notesfrom his son, and said that Mrs. Ward in her Atlantic City retirement had had no better word. So atlength the doctor resolved to act; and despite a curious sensation inspired by old legends ofJoseph Curwen, and by more recent revelations and warnings from Charles Ward, set boldly out forthe bungalow on the bluff above the river.

Willett had visited the spot before through sheer curiosity, though of coursenever entering the house or proclaiming his presence; hence knew exactly the route to take. Drivingout Broad Street one early afternoon toward the end of February in his small motor, he thoughtoddly of the grim party which had taken that selfsame road a hundred and fifty-seven years beforeon a terrible errand which none might ever comprehend.

The ride through the city’s decaying fringe was short, and trim Edgewood andsleepy Pawtuxet presently spread out ahead. Willett turned to the right down Lockwood Street anddrove his car as far along that rural road as he could, then alighted and walked north to where thebluff towered above the lovely bends of the river and the sweep of misty downlands beyond. Houseswere still few here, and there was no mistaking the isolated bungalow with its concrete garage on ahigh point of land at his left. Stepping briskly up the neglected gravel walk he rapped at the doorwith a firm hand, and spoke without a tremor to the evil Portuguese mulatto who opened it to thewidth of a crack.

He must, he said, see Charles Ward at once on vitally important business. Noexcuse would be accepted, and a repulse would mean only a full report of the matter to the elderWard. 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 darkinterior a husky whisper which somehow chilled the hearer through and through though he did notknow why he feared it. “Let him in, Tony”, it said, “we may as well talk now asever.” But disturbing as was the whisper, the greater fear was that which immediatelyfollowed. The floor creaked and the speaker hove in sight—and the owner of those strange andresonant tones was seen to be no other than Charles Dexter Ward.

The minuteness with which Dr. Willett recalled and recorded his conversation ofthat afternoon is due to the importance he assigns to this particular period. For at last heconcedes a vital change in Charles Dexter Ward’s mentality, and believes that the youth nowspoke from a brain hopelessly alien to the brain whose growth he had watched for six and twentyyears. Controversy with Dr. Lyman has compelled him to be very specific, and he definitely datesthe madness of Charles Ward from the time the typewritten notes began to reach his parents. Thosenotes are not in Ward’s normal style; not even in the style of that last frantic letter toWillett. Instead, they are strange and archaic, as if the snapping of the writer’s mind hadreleased a flood of tendencies and impressions picked up unconsciously through boyhoodantiquarianism. There is an obvious effort to be modern, but the spirit and occasionally thelanguage are those of the past.

The past, too, was evident in Ward’s every tone and gesture as he receivedthe doctor in that shadowy bungalow. He bowed, motioned Willett to a seat, and began to speakabruptly 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 hopeyou will say nothing to alarm him.”

Willett was studying these scraping tones with extreme care, but studying evenmore closely the face of the speaker. Something, he felt, was wrong; and he thought of what thefamily had told him about the fright of that Yorkshire butler one night. He wished it were not sodark, but did not request that any blind be opened. Instead, he merely asked Ward why he had sobelied the frantic note of little more than a week before.

“I was coming to that”, the host replied. “You must know, I amin a very bad state of nerves, and do and say queer things I cannot account for. As I have told youoften, I am on the edge of great matters; and the bigness of them has a way of making melight-headed. Any man might well be frighted of what I have found, but I am not to be put off forlong. I was a dunce to have that guard and stick at home; for having gone this far, my place ishere. I am not well spoke of by my prying neighbours, and perhaps I was led by weakness to believemyself what they say of me. There is no evil to any in what I do, so long as I do it rightly. Havethe 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 surerthan 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 whenthose witless peeping Toms came and murdered him. I now have it again, or am coming veryimperfectly to have a part of it. This time nothing must happen, and least of all through any idiotfears 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 owe him an apology for anything ill I have said of him. I wishI had no need to spare him, but there were things he had to do elsewhere. His zeal is equal to minein all those matters, and I suppose that when I feared the work I feared him too as my greatesthelper in it.”

Ward paused, and the doctor hardly knew what to say or think. He felt almostfoolish in the face of this calm repudiation of the letter; and yet there clung to him the factthat while the present discourse was strange and alien and indubitably mad, the note itself hadbeen tragic in its naturalness and likeness to the Charles Ward he knew. Willett now tried to turnthe talk on early matters, and recall to the youth some past events which would restore a familiarmood; but in this process he obtained only the most grotesque results. It was the same with all thealienists later on. Important sections of Charles Ward’s store of mental images, mainly thosetouching modern times and his own personal life, had been unaccountably expunged; whilst all themassed antiquarianism of his youth had welled up from some profound subconsciousness to engulf thecontemporary and the individual. The youth’s intimate knowledge of elder things was abnormaland unholy, and he tried his best to hide it. When Willett would mention some favourite object ofhis boyhood archaistic studies he often shed by pure accident such a light as no normal mortalcould conceivably be expected to possess, and the doctor shuddered as the glib allusion glidedby.

It was not wholesome to know so much about the way the fat sheriff’s wigfell off as he leaned over at the play in Mr. Douglass’ Histrionick Academy in King Street onthe eleventh of February, 1762, which fell on a Thursday; or about how the actors cut the text ofSteele’s Conscious Lovers so badly that one was almost glad the Baptist-riddenlegislature closed the theatre a fortnight later. That Thomas Sabin’s Boston coach was“damn’d uncomfortable” old letters may well have told; but what healthyantiquarian could recall how the creaking of Epenetus Olney’s new signboard (the gaudy crownhe set up after he took to calling his tavern the Crown Coffee House) was exactly like the firstfew 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 topicshe waved aside quite summarily, whilst regarding antique affairs he soon shewed the plainestboredom. What he wished clearly enough was only to satisfy his visitor enough to make him departwithout the intention of returning. To this end he offered to shew Willett the entire house, and atonce 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 ever to have filled the wide gaps onWard’s shelves at home, and that the meagre so-called “laboratory” was theflimsiest 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 drasticneed be done just then. Above all, Mrs. Ward must be kept in as complete an ignorance as herson’s own strange typed notes would permit.

Mr. Ward now determined to call in person upon his son, making it wholly asurprise visit. Dr. Willett took him in his car one evening, guiding him to within sight of thebungalow and waiting patiently for his return. The session was a long one, and the father emergedin a very saddened and perplexed state. His reception had developed much like Willett’s, savethat Charles had been an excessively long time in appearing after the visitor had forced his wayinto the hall and sent the Portuguese away with an imperative demand; and in the bearing of thealtered son there was no trace of filial affection. The lights had been dim, yet even so the youthhad complained that they dazzled him outrageously. He had not spoken out loud at all, averring thathis throat was in very poor condition; but in his hoarse whisper there was a quality so vaguelydisturbing that Mr. Ward could not banish it from his mind.

Now definitely leagued together to do all they could toward the youth’smental salvation, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett set about collecting every scrap of data which the casemight afford. Pawtuxet gossip was the first item they studied, and this was relatively easy toglean since both had friends in that region. Dr. Willett obtained the most rumours because peopletalked more frankly to him than to a parent of the central figure, and from all he heard he couldtell that young Ward’s life had become indeed a strange one. Common tongues would notdissociate his household from the vampirism of the previous summer, while the nocturnal comings andgoings of the motor trucks provided their share of dark speculation. Local tradesmen spoke of thequeerness of the orders brought them by the evil-looking mulatto, and in particular of theinordinate amounts of meat and fresh blood secured from the two butcher shops in the immediateneighbourhood. 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 thingswere harder to pin down, but all the vague hints tallied in certain basic essentials. Noises of aritual 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 spreadingcrypts. Recalling the ancient tales of Joseph Curwen’s catacombs, and assuming for grantedthat the present bungalow had been selected because of its situation on the old Curwen site asrevealed in one or another of the documents found behind the picture, Willett and Mr. Ward gavethis phase of the gossip much attention; and searched many times without success for the door inthe river-bank which old manuscripts mentioned. As to popular opinions of the bungalow’svarious inhabitants, it was soon plain that the Brava Portuguese was loathed, the bearded andspectacled Dr. Allen feared, and the pallid young scholar disliked to a profound extent. During thelast week or two Ward had obviously changed much, abandoning his attempts at affability andspeaking only in hoarse but oddly repellent whispers on the few occasions that he venturedforth.

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 factof 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 givenmuch for a glimpse of the papers Charles had found, for very clearly the key to the youth’smadness lay in what he had learned of the ancient wizard and his doings.

And yet, after all, it was from no step of Mr. Ward’s or Dr. Willett’sthat the next move in this singular case proceeded. The father and the physician, rebuffed andconfused by a shadow too shapeless and intangible to combat, had rested uneasily on their oarswhile the typed notes of young Ward to his parents grew fewer and fewer. Then came the first of themonth with its customary financial adjustments, and the clerks at certain banks began a peculiarshaking of heads and telephoning from one to the other. Officials who knew Charles Ward by sightwent down to the bungalow to ask why every cheque of his appearing at this juncture was a clumsyforgery, and were reassurred less than they ought to have been when the youth hoarsely explainedthat his hand had lately been so much affected by a nervous shock as to make normal writingimpossible. He could, he said, form no written characters at all except with great difficulty; andcould prove it by the fact that he had been forced to type all his recent letters, even those tohis father and mother, who would bear out the assertion.

What made the investigators pause in confusion was not this circ*mstance alone,for that was nothing unprecedented or fundamentally suspicious; nor even the Pawtuxet gossip, ofwhich one or two of them had caught echoes. It was the muddled discourse of the young man whichnonplussed them, implying as it did a virtually total loss of memory concerning important monetarymatters which he had had at his fingertips only a month or two before. Something was wrong; fordespite the apparent coherence and rationality of his speech, there could be no normal reason forthis 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 anantiquarian, but even the most hopeless antiquarians do not make daily use of obsolete phraseologyand gestures. Altogether, this combination of hoarseness, palsied hands, bad memory, and alteredspeech and bearing must represent some disturbance or malady of genuine gravity, which no doubtformed the basis of the prevailing odd rumours; and after their departure the party of officialsdecided 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 ofhelpless resignation. Willett looked over the strained and awkward signatures of the cheques, andcompared them in his mind with the penmanship of that last frantic note. Certainly, the change wasradical and profound, and yet there was something damnably familiar about the new writing. It hadcrabbed and archaic tendencies of a very curious sort, and seemed to result from a type of strokeutterly different from that which the youth had always used. It was strange—but where had heseen it before? On the whole, it was obvious that Charles was insane. Of that there could be nodoubt. And since it appeared unlikely that he could handle his property or continue to deal withthe outside world much longer, something must quickly be done toward his oversight and possiblecure. 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 thecase, and who conferred at length in the now unused library of their young patient, examining whatbooks 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 CharlesWard’s studies had been enough to unseat or at least to warp any ordinary intellect, andwished most heartily that they could see his more intimate volumes and documents; but this latterthey knew they could do, if at all, only after a scene at the bungalow itself. Willett now reviewedthe whole case with febrile energy; it being at this time that he obtained the statements of theworkmen who had seen Charles find the Curwen documents, and that he collated the incidents of thedestroyed 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 objectand questioning the now acknowledged patient with extreme minuteness. Charles, though he wasinordinately long in answering the summons and was still redolent of strange and noxious laboratoryodours 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 toabstruse 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 conductwould have sent his interviewers away in bafflement had not the persistently archaic trend of hisspeech and unmistakable replacement of modern by ancient ideas in his consciousness marked him outas one definitely removed from the normal. Of his work he would say no more to the group of doctorsthan he had formerly said to his family and to Dr. Willett, and his frantic note of the previousmonth he dismissed as mere nerves and hysteria. He insisted that this shadowy bungalow possessed nolibrary or laboratory beyond the visible ones, and waxed abstruse in explaining the absence fromthe house of such odours as now saturated all his clothing. Neighbourhood gossip he attributed tonothing more than the cheap inventiveness of baffled curiosity. Of the whereabouts of Dr. Allen hesaid he did not feel at liberty to speak definitely, but assured his inquisitors that the beardedand spectacled man would return when needed. In paying off the stolid Brava who resisted allquestioning by the visitors, and in closing the bungalow which still seemed to hold such nightedsecrets, Ward shewed no sign of nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to pause as thoughlistening for something very faint. He was apparently animated by a calmly philosophic resignation,as if his removal were the merest transient incident which would cause the least trouble iffacilitated and disposed of once and for all. It was clear that he trusted to his obviouslyunimpaired keenness of absolute mentality to overcome all the embarrassments into which his twistedmemory, his lost voice and handwriting, and his secretive and eccentric behaviour had led him. Hismother, it was agreed, was not to be told of the change; his father supplying typed notes in hisname. 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 allthe physicians connected with the case. It was then that the physical oddities were noticed; theslackened metabolism, the altered skin, and the disproportionate neural reactions. Dr. Willett wasthe most perturbed of the various examiners, for he had attended Ward all his life and couldappreciate with terrible keenness the extent of his physical disorganisation. Even the familiarolive mark on his hip was gone, while on his chest was a great black mole or cicatrice which hadnever been there before, and which made Willett wonder whether the youth had ever submitted to anyof the “witch markings” reputed to be inflicted at certain unwholesome nocturnalmeetings in wild and lonely places. The doctor could not keep his mind off a certain transcribedwitch-trial record from Salem which Charles had shewn him in the old non-secretive days, and whichread: “Mr. G. B. on that Nighte putt y e Divell his Marke uponBridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and DeborahB.” Ward’s face, too, troubled him horribly, till at length he suddenly discovered whyhe was horrified. For above the young man’s right eye was something which he had neverpreviously noticed—a small scar or pit precisely like that in the crumbled painting of oldJoseph Curwen, and perhaps attesting some hideous ritualistic inoculation to which both hadsubmitted at a certain stage of their occult careers.

While Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital a very strictwatch was kept on all mail addressed either to him or to Dr. Allen, which Mr. Ward had ordereddelivered at the family home. Willett had predicted that very little would be found, since anycommunications of a vital nature would probably have been exchanged by messenger; but in the latterpart of March there did come a letter from Prague for Dr. Allen which gave both the doctor and thefather deep thought. It was in a very crabbed and archaic hand; and though clearly not the effortof a foreigner, shewed almost as singular a departure from modern English as the speech of youngWard himself. It read:

Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett paused in utter chaos before this apparent bit ofunrelieved 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 thewild reference and denunciation in the youth’s last frantic letter. And what of thisaddressing of the bearded and spectacled stranger as “Mr. J. C.”? There was no escapingthe inference, but there are limits to possible monstrosity. Who was “Simon O.”; theold man Ward had visited in Prague four years previously? Perhaps, but in the centuries behindthere 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 photostaticcopies of the Orne formulae which Charles had once shewn him. What horrors and mysteries, whatcontradictions and contraventions of Nature, had come back after a century and a half to harass OldProvidence with her clustered spires and domes?

The father and the old physician, virtually at a loss what to do or think, went tosee Charles at the hospital and questioned him as delicately as they could about Dr. Allen, aboutthe Prague visit, and about what he had learned of Simon or Jedediah Orne of Salem. To all theseinquiries the youth was politely non-committal, merely barking in his hoarse whisper that he hadfound Dr. Allen to have a remarkable spiritual rapport with certain souls from the past, and thatany correspondent the bearded man might have in Prague would probably be similarly gifted. Whenthey left, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett realised to their chagrin that they had really been the onesunder catechism; and that without imparting anything vital himself, the confined youth had adroitlypumped them of everything the Prague letter had contained.

Drs. Peck, Waite, and Lyman were not inclined to attach much importance to thestrange correspondence of young Ward’s companion; for they knew the tendency of kindredeccentrics and monomaniacs to band together, and believed that Charles or Allen had merelyunearthed an expatriated counterpart—perhaps one who had seen Orne’s handwriting andcopied it in an attempt to pose as the bygone character’s reincarnation. Allen himself wasperhaps a similar case, and may have persuaded the youth into accepting him as an avatar of thelong-dead Curwen. Such things had been known before, and on the same basis the hard-headed doctorsdisposed of Willett’s growing disquiet about Charles Ward’s present handwriting, asstudied from unpremeditated specimens obtained by various ruses. Willett thought he had placed itsodd familiarity at last, and that what it vaguely resembled was the bygone penmanship of old JosephCurwen himself; but this the other physicians regarded as a phase of imitativeness only to beexpected in a mania of this sort, and refused to grant it any importance either favourable orunfavourable. Recognising this prosaic attitude in his colleagues, Willett advised Mr. Ward to keepto 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 fatherand physician paused in awe before breaking the seal. This read as follows:

Castle Ferenczy7 March 1928.

Dear C.:—Hadd a Squad of 20 Militia up to talk about what the Country Folk say. Must diggdeeper and have less Hearde. These Roumanians plague me damnably, being officious and particularwhere you cou’d buy a Magyar off with a Drinke and ffood. Last monthe M. got me y e Sarcophagus of y e Five Sphinxes fromy e Acropolis where He whome I call’d up say’d itwou’d be, and I have hadde 3 Talkes with What was therein inhum’d. It will go toS. O. in Prague directly, and thence to you. It is stubborn but you know y e Way with Such. You shew Wisdom in having lesse about than Before; forthere was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eat’g off their Heads, and it made Much tobe founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle knowe. You can now move and worke elsewherewith no Kill’g Trouble if needful, tho’ I hope no Thing will soon force you to soBothersome a Course. I rejoice that you traffick not so much with Those Outside; for therewas ever a Mortall Peril in it, and you are sensible what it did when you ask’d Protection ofOne not dispos’d to give it. You excel me in gett’g y efformulae so another may saye them with Success, but Borellus fancy’d it wou’dbe so if just y e right Wordes were hadd. Does y e Boy use ’em often? I regret that he growes squeamish, as Ifear’d he wou’d when I hadde him here nigh 15 Monthes, but am sensible you knowe how todeal with him. You can’t saye him down with y e fformula, forthat will Worke only upon such as y e other fformula hathcall’d up from Saltes; but you still have strong Handes and Knife and Pistol, and Graves arenot harde to digg, nor Acids loth to burne. O. sayes you have promis’d him B. F. I must havehim after. B. goes to you soone, and may he give you what you wishe of that Darke Thing beloweMemphis. Imploy care in what you calle up, and beware of y e Boy. Itwill be ripe in a yeare’s time to have up y e Legions fromUnderneath, 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.

Nephren-Ka nai HadothEdw: 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 couldcontrovert the fact that the strangely bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen, of whom Charles’sfrantic letter had spoken as such a monstrous menace, was in close and sinister correspondence withtwo inexplicable creatures whom Ward had visited in his travels and who plainly claimed to besurvivals or avatars of Curwen’s old Salem colleagues; that he was regarding himself as thereincarnation of Joseph Curwen, and that he entertained—or was at least advised toentertain—murderous designs against a “boy” who could scarcely be other thanCharles Ward. There was organised horror afoot; and no matter who had started it, the missing Allenwas by this time at the bottom of it. Therefore, thanking heaven that Charles was now safe in thehospital, Mr. Ward lost no time in engaging detectives to learn all they could of the crypticbearded doctor; finding whence he had come and what Pawtuxet knew of him, and if possiblediscovering his current whereabouts. Supplying the men with one of the bungalow keys which Charlesyielded up, he urged them to explore Allen’s vacant room which had been identified when thepatient’s belongings had been packed; obtaining what clues they could from any effects hemight have left about. Mr. Ward talked with the detectives in his son’s old library, and theyfelt a marked relief when they left it at last; for there seemed to hover about the place a vagueaura of evil. Perhaps it was what they had heard of the infamous old wizard whose picture had oncestared from the panelled overmantel, and perhaps it was something different and irrelevant; but inany case they all half sensed an intangible miasma which centred in that carven vestige of an olderdwelling 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 thesoul of Marinus Bicknell Willett, and has added a decade to the visible age of one whose youth waseven then far behind. Dr. Willett had conferred at length with Mr. Ward, and had come to anagreement with him on several points which both felt the alienists would ridicule. There was, theyconceded, a terrible movement alive in the world, whose direct connexion with a necromancy evenolder than the Salem witchcraft could not be doubted. That at least two living men—and oneother of whom they dared not think—were in absolute possession of minds or personalitieswhich had functioned as early as 1690 or before was likewise almost unassailably proved even in theface of all known natural laws. What these horrible creatures—and Charles Ward aswell—were doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear from their letters and from every bit oflight both old and new which had filtered in upon the case. They were robbing the tombs of all theages, including those of the world’s wisest and greatest men, in the hope of recovering fromthe bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and lore which had once animated and informedthem.

A hideous traffick was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby illustriousbones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys swapping books; and from what wasextorted from this centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything whichthe cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man or group. They had found unholy ways to keep theirbrains alive, either in the same body or different bodies; and had evidently achieved a way oftapping the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered together. There had, it seems, been sometruth in chimerical old Borellus when he wrote of preparing from even the most antique remainscertain “Essential Saltes” from which the shade of a long-dead living thing might beraised up. There was a formula for evoking such a shade, and another for putting it down; and ithad now been so perfected that it could be taught successfully. One must be careful aboutevocations, 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 wellas from the grave, and in this process also one must be careful. Joseph Curwen had indubitablyevoked 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 hismind on forgotten things? He had been led to find certain directions, and he had used them. He hadtalked with the man of horror in Prague and stayed long with the creature in the mountains ofTransylvania. And he must have found the grave of Joseph Curwen at last. That newspaper item andwhat his mother had heard in the night were too significant to overlook. Then he had summonedsomething, and it must have come. That mighty voice aloft on Good Friday, and thosedifferent tones in the locked attic laboratory. What were they like, with their depth andhollowness? Was there not here some awful foreshadowing of the dreaded stranger Dr. Allen with hisspectral bass? Yes, that was what Mr. Ward had felt with vague horror in his single talkwith the man—if man it were—over the telephone!

What hellish consciousness or voice, what morbid shade or presence, had come toanswer Charles Ward’s secret rites behind that locked door? Those voices heard inargument— “must have it red for three months” —Good God! Was not that justbefore the vampirism broke out? The rifling of Ezra Weeden’s ancient grave, and the crieslater at Pawtuxet—whose mind had planned the vengeance and rediscovered the shunned seat ofelder 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 feelsure that the mind of Joseph Curwen had come to earth again and was following its ancientmorbidities. 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 virtuallybeyond dispute, some effort must be made to find it. Willett and Mr. Ward, conscious of thesceptical attitude of the alienists, resolved during their final conference to undertake a jointsecret exploration of unparalleled thoroughness; and agreed to meet at the bungalow on thefollowing morning with valises and with certain tools and accessories suited to architecturalsearch and underground exploration.

The morning of April 6th dawned clear, and both explorers were at the bungalow byten o’clock. Mr. Ward had the key, and an entry and cursory survey were made. From thedisordered condition of Dr. Allen’s room it was obvious that the detectives had been therebefore, and the later searchers hoped that they had found some clue which might prove of value. Ofcourse the main business lay in the cellar; so thither they descended without much delay, againmaking the circuit which each had vainly made before in the presence of the mad young owner. For atime everything seemed baffling, each inch of the earthen floor and stone walls having so solid andinnocuous an aspect that the thought of a yawning aperture was scarcely to be entertained. Willettreflected that since the original cellar was dug without knowledge of any catacombs beneath, thebeginning of the passage would represent the strictly modern delving of young Ward and hisassociates, where they had probed for the ancient vaults whose rumour could have reached them by nowholesome means.

The doctor tried to put himself in Charles’s place to see how a delver wouldbe likely to start, but could not gain much inspiration from this method. Then he decided onelimination as a policy, and went carefully over the whole subterranean surface both vertical andhorizontal, 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 had tried oncebefore in vain. Now experimenting in every possible way, and exerting a double strength, he finallyfound that the top did indeed turn and slide horizontally on a corner pivot. Beneath it lay a trimconcrete surface with an iron manhole, to which Mr. Ward at once rushed with excited zeal. Thecover was not hard to lift, and the father had quite removed it when Willett noticed the queernessof his aspect. He was swaying and nodding dizzily, and in the gust of noxious air which swept upfrom the black pit beneath the doctor soon recognised ample cause.

In a moment Dr. Willett had his fainting companion on the floor above and wasreviving him with cold water. Mr. Ward responded feebly, but it could be seen that the mephiticblast from the crypt had in some way gravely sickened him. Wishing to take no chances, Willetthastened out to Broad Street for a taxicab and had soon dispatched the sufferer home despite hisweak-voiced protests; after which he produced an electric torch, covered his nostrils with a bandof sterile gauze, and descended once more to peer into the new-found depths. The foul air had nowslightly abated, and Willett was able to send a beam of light down the Stygian hole. For about tenfeet, he saw, it was a sheer cylindrical drop with concrete walls and an iron ladder; after whichthe hole appeared to strike a flight of old stone steps which must originally have emerged to earthsomewhat southwest of the present building.

Willett freely admits that for a moment the memory of the old Curwen legends kepthim from climbing down alone into that malodorous gulf. He could not help thinking of what LukeFenner 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 unwholesomemoss of centuries. Down, down, ran the steps; not spirally, but in three abrupt turns; and withsuch narrowness that two men could have passed only with difficulty. He had counted about thirtywhen a sound reached him very faintly; and after that he did not feel disposed to count anymore.

It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of Nature whichare not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorusedanguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness andsoul-sickening overtones. Was it for this that Ward had seemed to listen on that day he wasremoved? It was the most shocking thing that Willett had ever heard, and it continued from nodeterminate point as the doctor reached the bottom of the steps and cast his torchlight around onlofty corridor walls surmounted by Cyclopean vaulting and pierced by numberless black archways. Thehall in which he stood was perhaps fourteen feet high to the middle of the vaulting and ten ortwelve feet broad. Its pavement was of large chipped flagstones, and its walls and roof were ofdressed masonry. Its length he could not imagine, for it stretched ahead indefinitely into theblackness. Of the archways, some had doors of the old six-panelled colonial type, whilst others hadnone.

Overcoming the dread induced by the smell and the howling, Willett began toexplore these archways one by one; finding beyond them rooms with groined stone ceilings, each ofmedium size and apparently of bizarre uses. Most of them had fireplaces, the upper courses of whosechimneys would have formed an interesting study in engineering. Never before or since had he seensuch instruments or suggestions of instruments as here loomed up on every hand through the buryingdust and cobwebs of a century and a half, in many cases evidently shattered as if by the ancientraiders. For many of the chambers seemed wholly untrodden by modern feet, and must have representedthe earliest and most obsolete phases of Joseph Curwen’s experimentation. Finally there camea room of obvious modernity, or at least of recent occupancy. There were oil heaters, bookshelvesand tables, chairs and cabinets, and a desk piled high with papers of varying antiquity andcontemporaneousness. Candlesticks and oil lamps stood about in several places; and finding amatch-safe handy, Willett lighted such as were ready for use.

In the fuller gleam it appeared that this apartment was nothing less than thelatest study or library of Charles Ward. Of the books the doctor had seen many before, and a goodpart of the furniture had plainly come from the Prospect Street mansion. Here and there was a piecewell known to Willett, and the sense of familiarity became so great that he half forgot thenoisomeness and the wailing, both of which were plainer here than they had been at the foot of thesteps. His first duty, as planned long ahead, was to find and seize any papers which might seem ofvital importance; especially those portentous documents found by Charles so long ago behind thepicture in Olney Court. As he searched he perceived how stupendous a task the final unravellingwould be; for file on file was stuffed with papers in curious hands and bearing curious designs, sothat months or even years might be needed for a thorough deciphering and editing. Once he foundlarge packets of letters with Prague and Rakus postmarks, and in writing clearly recognisable asOrne’s and Hutchinson’s; all of which he took with him as part of the bundle to beremoved in his valise.

At last, in a locked mahogany cabinet once gracing the Ward home, Willett foundthe batch of old Curwen papers; recognising them from the reluctant glimpse Charles had granted himso many years ago. The youth had evidently kept them together very much as they had been when firsthe found them, since all the titles recalled by the workmen were present except the papersaddressed to Orne and Hutchinson, and the cipher with its key. Willett placed the entire lot in hisvalise and continued his examination of the files. Since young Ward’s immediate condition wasthe greatest matter at stake, the closest searching was done among the most obviously recentmatter; and in this abundance of contemporary manuscript one very baffling oddity was noted. Theoddity was the slight amount in Charles’s normal writing, which indeed included nothing morerecent than two months before. On the other hand, there were literally reams of symbols andformulae, historical notes and philosophical comment, in a crabbed penmanship absolutely identicalwith the ancient script of Joseph Curwen, though of undeniably modern dating. Plainly, a part ofthe latter-day programme had been a sedulous imitation of the old wizard’s writing, whichCharles seemed to have carried to a marvellous state of perfection. Of any third hand which mighthave been Allen’s there was not a trace. If he had indeed come to be the leader, he must haveforced young Ward to act as his amanuensis.

In this new material one mystic formula, or rather pair of formulae, recurred sooften that Willett had it by heart before he had half finished his quest. It consisted of twoparallel columns, the left-hand one surmounted by the archaic symbol called “Dragon’sHead” and used in almanacks to indicate the ascending node, and the right-hand one headed bya corresponding sign of “Dragon’s Tail” or descending node. The appearance of thewhole was something like this, and almost unconsciously the doctor realised that the second halfwas no more than the first written syllabically backward with the exception of the finalmonosyllables and of the odd name Yog-Sothoth, which he had come to recognise under variousspellings from other things he had seen in connexion with this horrible matter. The formulae wereas follows— exactly so, as Willett is abundantly able to testify—and the firstone struck an odd note of uncomfortable latent memory in his brain, which he recognised later whenreviewing the events of that horrible Good Friday of the previous year.

So haunting were these formulae, and so frequently did he come upon them, that before the doctorknew it he was repeating them under his breath. Eventually, however, he felt he had secured all thepapers he could digest to advantage for the present; hence resolved to examine no more till hecould bring the sceptical alienists en masse for an ampler and more systematic raid. He had stillto find the hidden laboratory, so leaving his valise in the lighted room he emerged again into theblack noisome corridor whose vaulting echoed ceaselessly with that dull and hideous whine.

The next few rooms he tried were all abandoned, or filled only with crumblingboxes and ominous-looking leaden coffins; but impressed him deeply with the magnitude of JosephCurwen’s original operations. He thought of the slaves and seamen who had disappeared, of thegraves which had been violated in every part of the world, and of what that final raiding partymust have seen; and then he decided it was better not to think any more. Once a great stonestaircase mounted at his right, and he deduced that this must have reached to one of the Curwenoutbuildings—perhaps the famous stone edifice with the high slit-like windows—providedthe steps he had descended had led from the steep-roofed farmhouse. Suddenly the walls seemed tofall away ahead, and the stench and the wailing grew stronger. Willett saw that he had come upon avast open space, so great that his torchlight would not carry across it; and as he advanced heencountered occasional stout pillars supporting the arches of the roof.

After a time he reached a circle of pillars grouped like the monoliths ofStonehenge, with a large carved altar on a base of three steps in the centre; and so curious werethe carvings on that altar that he approached to study them with his electric light. But when hesaw what they were he shrank away shuddering, and did not stop to investigate the dark stains whichdiscoloured the upper surface and had spread down the sides in occasional thin lines. Instead, hefound the distant wall and traced it as it swept round in a gigantic circle perforated byoccasional black doorways and indented by a myriad of shallow cells with iron gratings and wristand ankle bonds on chains fastened to the stone of the concave rear masonry. These cells wereempty, but still the horrible odour and the dismal moaning continued, more insistent now than ever,and seemingly varied at times by a sort of slippery thumping.

From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willett’s attention couldno longer be diverted. Both were plainer and more hideous in the great pillared hall than anywhereelse, and carried a vague impression of being far below, even in this dark nether world ofsubterrene mystery. Before trying any of the black archways for steps leading further down, thedoctor cast his beam of light about the stone-flagged floor. It was very loosely paved, and atirregular intervals there would occur a slab curiously pierced by small holes in no definitearrangement, 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 whichencompassed everything. As he walked slowly about it suddenly occurred to Willett that both thenoise and the odour seemed strongest directly above the oddly pierced slabs, as if they might becrude trap-doors leading down to some still deeper region of horror. Kneeling by one, he worked atit with his hands, and found that with extreme difficulty he could budge it. At his touch themoaning beneath ascended to a louder key, and only with vast trepidation did he persevere in thelifting of the heavy stone. A stench unnamable now rose up from below, and the doctor’s headreeled dizzily as he laid back the slab and turned his torch upon the exposed square yard of gapingblackness.

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 discernedonly the brick-faced top of a cylindrical well perhaps a yard and a half in diameter and devoid ofany ladder or other means of descent. As the light shone down, the wailing changed suddenly to aseries of horrible yelps; in conjunction with which there came again that sound of blind, futilescrambling and slippery thumping. The explorer trembled, unwilling even to imagine what noxiousthing might be lurking in that abyss, but in a moment mustered up the courage to peer over therough-hewn brink; lying at full length and holding the torch downward at arm’s length to seewhat might lie below. For a second he could distinguish nothing but the slimy, moss-grown brickwalls 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 bottomof the narrow shaft, which must have been from twenty to twenty-five feet below the stone floorwhere he lay. The torch shook in his hand, but he looked again to see what manner of livingcreature might be immured there in the darkness of that unnatural well; left starving by young Wardthrough all the long month since the doctors had taken him away, and clearly only one of a vastnumber prisoned in the kindred wells whose pierced stone covers so thickly studded in the floor ofthe great vaulted cavern. Whatever the things were, they could not lie down in their crampedspaces; but must have crouched and whined and waited and feebly leaped all those hideous weekssince their master had abandoned them unheeded.

But Marinus Bicknell Willett was sorry that he looked again; for surgeon andveteran of the dissecting-room though he was, he has not been the same since. It is hard to explainjust how a single sight of a tangible object with measureable dimensions could so shake and changea man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolismand suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker’s perspective and whispersterrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protectiveillusions of common vision. In that second look Willett saw such an outline or entity, for duringthe next few instants he was undoubtedly as stark mad as any inmate of Dr. Waite’s privatehospital. He dropped the electric torch from a hand drained of muscular power or nervouscoördination, nor heeded the sound of crunching teeth which told of its fate at the bottom ofthe pit. He screamed and screamed and screamed in a voice whose falsetto panic no acquaintance ofhis would ever have recognised; and though he could not rise to his feet he crawled and rolleddesperately away over the damp pavement where dozens of Tartarean wells poured forth theirexhausted whining and yelping to answer his own insane cries. He tore his hands on the rough, loosestones, and many times bruised his head against the frequent pillars, but still he kept on. Then atlast he slowly came to himself in the utter blackness and stench, and stopped his ears against thedroning wail into which the burst of yelping had subsided. He was drenched with perspiration andwithout means of producing a light; stricken and unnerved in the abysmal blackness and horror, andcrushed with a memory he never could efface. Beneath him dozens of those things still lived, andfrom one of the shafts the cover was removed. He knew that what he had seen could never climb upthe 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 thehellish altar, but it was alive. Nature had never made it in this form, for it was too palpablyunfinished. The deficiencies were of the most surprising sort, and the abnormalities ofproportion could not be described. Willett consents only to say that this type of thing must haverepresented entities which Ward called up from imperfect salts, and which he kept forservile or ritualistic purposes. If it had not had a certain significance, its image would not havebeen carved on that damnable stone. It was not the worst thing depicted on that stone—butWillett never opened the other pits. At the time, the first connected idea in his mind was an idleparagraph from some of the old Curwen data he had digested long before; a phrase used by Simon orJedediah Orne in that portentous confiscated letter to the bygone sorcerer: “Certainely,there was Noth’g butt y e 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 arecollection of those ancient lingering rumours anent the burned, twisted thing found in the fieldsa week after the Curwen raid. Charles Ward had once told the doctor what old Slocum said of thatobject; that it was neither thoroughly human, nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folkhad ever seen or read about.

These words hummed in the doctor’s mind as he rocked to and fro, squattingon the nitrous stone floor. He tried to drive them out, and repeated the Lord’s Prayer tohimself; eventually trailing off into a mnemonic hodge-podge like the modernistic Waste Landof Mr. T. S. Eliot and finally reverting to the oft-repeated dual formula he had lately found inWard’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 andlooking wildly about for any gleam of light in the clutching inkiness of the chilly air. Think hewould not; but he strained his eyes in every direction for some faint glint or reflection of thebright illumination he had left in the library. After a while he thought he detected a suspicion ofa glow infinitely far away, and toward this he crawled in agonised caution on hands and kneesamidst the stench and howling, always feeling ahead lest he collide with the numerous great pillarsor stumble into the abominable pit he had uncovered.

Once his shaking fingers touched something which he knew must be the steps leadingto the hellish altar, and from this spot he recoiled in loathing. At another time he encounteredthe pierced slab he had removed, and here his caution became almost pitiful. But he did not comeupon the dread aperture after all, nor did anything issue from that aperture to detain him. Whathad been down there made no sound nor stir. Evidently its crunching of the fallen electric torchhad not been good for it. Each time Willett’s fingers felt a perforated slab he trembled. Hispassage over it would sometimes increase the groaning below, but generally it would produce noeffect at all, since he moved very noiselessly. Several times during his progress the glow aheaddiminished perceptibly, and he realised that the various candles and lamps he had left must beexpiring one by one. The thought of being lost in utter darkness without matches amidst thisunderground world of nightmare labyrinths impelled him to rise to his feet and run, which he couldsafely do now that he had passed the open pit; for he knew that once the light failed, his onlyhope of rescue and survival would lie in whatever relief party Mr. Ward might send after missinghim for a sufficient period. Presently, however, he emerged from the open space into the narrowercorridor and definitely located the glow as coming from a door on his right. In a moment he hadreached 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 supplyhe had previously noticed, and when the room was bright again he looked about to see if he mightfind a lantern for further exploration. For racked though he was with horror, his sense of grimpurpose was still uppermost; and he was firmly determined to leave no stone unturned in his searchfor the hideous facts behind Charles Ward’s bizarre madness. Failing to find a lantern, hechose the smallest of the lamps to carry; also filling his pockets with candles and matches, andtaking with him a gallon can of oil, which he proposed to keep for reserve use in whatever hiddenlaboratory he might uncover beyond the terrible open space with its unclean altar and namelesscovered wells. To traverse that space again would require his utmost fortitude, but he knew it mustbe done. Fortunately neither the frightful altar nor the opened shaft was near the vastcell-indented wall which bounded the cavern area, and whose black mysterious archways would formthe 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 pitwith 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 verycurious accumulations of various objects. One was packed with rotting and dust-draped bales ofspare clothing, and the explorer thrilled when he saw that it was unmistakably the clothing of acentury and a half before. In another room he found numerous odds and ends of modern clothing, asif gradual provisions were being made to equip a large body of men. But what he disliked most ofall were the huge copper vats which occasionally appeared; these, and the sinister incrustationsupon them. He liked them even less than the weirdly figured leaden bowls whose rims retained suchobnoxious deposits and around which clung repellent odours perceptible above even the generalnoisomeness of the crypt. When he had completed about half the entire circuit of the wall he foundanother corridor like that from which he had come, and out of which many doors opened. This heproceeded to investigate; and after entering three rooms of medium size and of no significantcontents, 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 bottlesproclaimed it indeed the long-sought laboratory of Charles Ward—and no doubt of old JosephCurwen before him.

After lighting the three lamps which he found filled and ready, Dr. Willettexamined the place and all its appurtenances with the keenest interest; noting from the relativequantities of various reagents on the shelves that young Ward’s dominant concern must havebeen with some branch of organic chemistry. On the whole, little could be learned from thescientific ensemble, which included a gruesome-looking dissecting table; so that the room wasreally rather a disappointment. Among the books was a tattered old copy of Borellus inblack-letter, and it was weirdly interesting to note that Ward had underlined the same passagewhose marking had so perturbed good Mr. Merritt at Curwen’s farmhouse more than a century anda half before. That older copy, of course, must have perished along with the rest of Curwen’soccult library in the final raid. Three archways opened off the laboratory, and these the doctorproceeded to sample in turn. From his cursory survey he saw that two led merely to smallstorerooms; but these he canvassed with care, remarking the piles of coffins in various stages ofdamage and shuddering violently at two or three of the few coffin-plates he could decipher. Therewas much clothing also stored in these rooms, and several new and tightly nailed boxes which he didnot stop to investigate. Most interesting of all, perhaps, were some odd bits which he judged to befragments of old Joseph Curwen’s laboratory appliances. These had suffered damage at thehands of the raiders, but were still partly recognisable as the chemical paraphernalia of theGeorgian period.

The third archway led to a very sizeable chamber entirely lined with shelves andhaving in the centre a table bearing two lamps. These lamps Willett lighted, and in their brilliantglow studied the endless shelving which surrounded him. Some of the upper levels were whollyvacant, 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 handleand proportioned like a Phaleron jug. All had metal stoppers, and were covered withpeculiar-looking symbols moulded in low relief. In a moment the doctor noticed that these jugs wereclassified with great rigidity; all the lekythoi being on one side of the room with a large woodensign reading “Custodes” above them, and all the Phalerons on the other, correspondinglylabelled with a sign reading “Materia”. Each of the jars or jugs, except some on theupper shelves that turned out to be vacant, bore a cardboard tag with a number apparently referringto a catalogue; and Willett resolved to look for the latter presently. For the moment, however, hewas more interested in the nature of the array as a whole; and experimentally opened several of thelekythoi 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 ofvery light weight and of many shades of dull, neutral colour. To the colours which formed the onlypoint of variation there was no apparent method of disposal; and no distinction between whatoccurred in the lekythoi and what occurred in the Phalerons. A bluish-grey powder might be by theside of a pinkish-white one, and any one in a Phaleron might have its exact counterpart in alekythos. The most individual feature about the powders was their non-adhesiveness. Willett wouldpour one into his hand, and upon returning it to its jug would find that no residue whateverremained on its palm.

The meaning of the two signs puzzled him, and he wondered why this battery ofchemicals was separated so radically from those in glass jars on the shelves of the laboratoryproper. “Custodes”, “Materia”; that was the Latin for “Guards”and “Materials”, respectively—and then there came a flash of memory as to wherehe 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 Edward Hutchinson; and thephrase had read: “There was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eat’g off theirHeads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle knowe.” What didthis 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 theold non-secretive days Ward had told him of the Eleazar Smith diary recording the spying of Smithand Weeden on the Curwen farm, and in that dreadful chronicle there had been a mention ofconversations overheard before the old wizard betook himself wholly beneath the earth. There hadbeen, Smith and Weeden insisted, terrible colloquies wherein figured Curwen, certain captives ofhis, 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 wizardband was engaged in reducing as many human bodies or skeletons as they could?

So that was what these lekythoi contained; the monstrous fruit ofunhallowed rites and deeds, presumably won or cowed to such submission as to help, when called upby some hellish incantation, in the defence of their blasphemous master or the questioning of thosewho were not so willing? Willett shuddered at the thought of what he had been pouring in and out ofhis hands, and for a moment felt an impulse to flee in panic from that cavern of hideous shelveswith their silent and perhaps watching sentinels. Then he thought of the“Materia”—in the myriad Phaleron jugs on the other side of the room. Saltstoo—and if not the salts of “guards”, then the salts of what? God! Could it bepossible that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages; snatched bysupreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck and call ofmadmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose ultimate effect wouldconcern, 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 hadsifted their dust through his hands!

Then he noticed a small door at the farther end of the room, and calmed himselfenough to approach it and examine the crude sign chiselled above. It was only a symbol, but itfilled him with vague spiritual dread; for a morbid, dreaming friend of his had once drawn it onpaper and told him a few of the things it means in the dark abyss of sleep. It was the sign ofKoth, that dreamers see fixed above the archway of a certain black tower standing alone intwilight—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. Andit was, unmistakably, the same odour which had saturated Charles Ward’s clothing on the daythe doctors had taken him away. So it was here that the youth had been interrupted by the finalsummons? He was wiser than old Joseph Curwen, for he had not resisted. Willett, boldly determinedto penetrate every wonder and nightmare this nether realm might contain, seized the small lamp andcrossed the threshold. A wave of nameless fright rolled out to meet him, but he yielded to no whimand deferred to no intuition. There was nothing alive here to harm him, and he would not be stayedin 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, asingle chair, and two groups of curious machines with clamps and wheels, which Willett recognisedafter a moment as mediaeval instruments of torture. On one side of the door stood a rack of savagewhips, above which were some shelves bearing empty rows of shallow pedestalled cups of lead shapedlike Grecian kylikes. On the other side was the table; with a powerful Argand lamp, a pad andpencil, and two of the stoppered lekythoi from the shelves outside set down at irregular places asif temporarily or in haste. Willett lighted the lamp and looked carefully at the pad, to see whatnotes young Ward might have been jotting down when interrupted; but found nothing more intelligiblethan the following disjointed fragments in that crabbed Curwen chirography, which shed no light onthe case as a whole:

As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw that the wallopposite the door, between the two groups of torturing appliances in the corners, was covered withpegs from which hung a set of shapeless-looking robes of a rather dismal yellowish-white. But farmore interesting were the two vacant walls, both of which were thickly covered with mystic symbolsand formulae roughly chiselled in the smooth dressed stone. The damp floor also bore marks ofcarving; and with but little difficulty Willett deciphered a huge pentagram in the centre, with aplain circle about three feet wide half way between this and each corner. In one of these fourcircles, near where a yellowish robe had been flung carelessly down, there stood a shallow kylix ofthe sort found on the shelves above the whip-rack; and just outside the periphery was one of thePhaleron jugs from the shelves in the other room, its tag numbered 118. This was unstoppered, andproved 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 sequesteredcavern, lay a small amount of a dry, dull-greenish efflorescent powder which must have belonged inthe jug; and Willett almost reeled at the implications that came sweeping over him as he correlatedlittle by little the several elements and antecedents of the scene. The whips and the instrumentsof 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 hintsfrom letters and legends, and the thousand glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come totorment the friends and parents of Charles Ward—all these engulfed the doctor in a tidal waveof horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread in the pedestalled leaden kylix on thefloor.

With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began studying theformulae chiselled on the walls. From the stained and incrusted letters it was obvious that theywere carved in Joseph Curwen’s time, and their text was such as to be vaguely familiar to onewho had read much Curwen material or delved extensively into the history of magic. One the doctorclearly recognised as what Mrs. Ward heard her son chanting on that ominous Good Friday a yearbefore, and what an authority had told him was a very terrible invocation addressed to secret godsoutside the normal spheres. It was not spelled here exactly as Mrs. Ward had set it down frommemory, nor yet as the authority had shewn it to him in the forbidden pages of “EliphasLevi”; but its identity was unmistakable, and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton,Almousin, and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of fright through the searcher who had seenand 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 noless thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of recognition as he came upon the pair offormulae 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’sTail” heading them as in Ward’s scribblings. But the spelling differed quite widelyfrom that of the modern versions, as if old Curwen had had a different way of recording sound, oras 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 inhis 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 ofthe second word.

Ground as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy disturbedhim; and he found himself chanting the first of the formulae aloud in an effort to square the soundhe conceived with the letters he found carved. Weird and menacing in that abyss of antiqueblasphemy rang his voice; its accents keyed to a droning sing-song either through the spell of thepast and the unknown, or through the hellish example of that dull, godless wail from the pits whoseinhuman cadences rose and fell rhythmically in the distance through the stench and thedarkness.

But what was this cold wind which had sprung into life at the very outset of thechant? The lamps were sputtering woefully, and the gloom grew so dense that the letters on the wallnearly faded from sight. There was smoke, too, and an acrid odour which quite drowned out thestench from the far-away wells; an odour like that he had smelt before, yet infinitely stronger andmore pungent. He turned from the inscriptions to face the room with its bizarre contents, and sawthat the kylix on the floor, in which the ominous efflorescent powder had lain, was giving forth acloud of thick, greenish-black vapour of surprising volume and opacity. That powder—GreatGod! it had come from the shelf of “Materia”—what was it doing now, and what hadstarted 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 hehad seen, heard, and read of the frightful case of Joseph Curwen and Charles Dexter Ward. “Isay to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe. . . . Have y e Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure whenthere is any Doubte of Whom you have. . . . Three Talkes with What wastherein inhum’d. . . .” Mercy of Heaven, what is that shapebehind the parting smoke?

Marinus Bicknell Willett has no hope that any part of his tale will be believedexcept by certain sympathetic friends, hence he has made no attempt to tell it beyond his mostintimate circle. Only a few outsiders have ever heard it repeated, and of these the majority laughand remark that the doctor surely is getting old. He has been advised to take a long vacation andto shun future cases dealing with mental disturbance. But Mr. Ward knows that the veteran physicianspeaks 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? Didhe not telephone the doctor in vain that evening, and again the next day, and had he not driven tothe bungalow itself on that following noon, finding his friend unconscious but unharmed on one ofthe 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 hehad 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 theknees, and only a faint acrid odour reminded Mr. Ward of what he had smelt on his son that day hewas taken to the hospital. The doctor’s flashlight was missing, but his valise was safelythere, as empty as when he had brought it. Before indulging in any explanations, and obviously withgreat moral effort, Willett staggered dizzily down to the cellar and tried the fateful platformbefore the tubs. It was unyielding. Crossing to where he had left his yet unused tool satchel theday before, he obtained a chisel and began to pry up the stubborn planks one by one. Underneath thesmooth 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 subterrenehorrors, no secret library, no Curwen papers, no nightmare pits of stench and howling, nolaboratory or shelves or chiselled formulae, no. . . . Dr. Willett turned pale, andclutched at the younger man. “Yesterday”, he asked softly, “did you see ithere . . . and smell it?” And when Mr. Ward, himself transfixed with dread andwonder, found strength to nod an affirmative, the physician gave a sound half a sigh and half agasp, and nodded in turn. “Then I will tell you”, he said.

So for an hour, in the sunniest room they could find upstairs, the physicianwhispered his frightful tale to the wondering father. There was nothing to relate beyond thelooming up of that form when the greenish-black vapour from the kylix parted, and Willett was tootired to ask himself what had really occurred. There were futile, bewildered head-shakings fromboth men, and once Mr. Ward ventured a hushed suggestion, “Do you suppose it would be of anyuse to dig?” The doctor was silent, for it seemed hardly fitting for any human brain toanswer 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 upthe hole somehow.” And Willett again let silence answer for him.

But after all, this was not the final phase of the matter. Reaching for hishandkerchief before rising to leave, Dr. Willett’s fingers closed upon a piece of paper inhis pocket which had not been there before, and which was companioned by the candles and matches hehad seized in the vanished vault. It was a common sheet, torn obviously from the cheap pad in thatfabulous room of horror somewhere underground, and the writing upon it was that of an ordinary leadpencil—doubtless the one which had lain beside the pad. It was folded very carelessly, andbeyond 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 strainedover it, yet having combinations of symbols which seemed vaguely familiar. The briefly scrawledmessage was this, and its mystery lent purpose to the shaken pair, who forthwith walked steadilyout to the Ward car and gave orders to be driven first to a quiet dining place and then to the JohnHay Library on the hill.

At the library it was easy to find good manuals of palaeography, and over thesethe two men puzzled till the lights of evening shone out from the great chandelier. In the end theyfound what was needed. The letters were indeed no fantastic invention, but the normal script of avery dark period. They were the pointed Saxon minuscules of the eighth or ninth century A.D., andbrought with them memories of an uncouth time when under a fresh Christian veneer ancient faithsand ancient rites stirred stealthily, and the pale moon of Britain looked sometimes on strangedeeds in the Roman ruins of Caerleon and Hexham, and by the towers along Hadrian’s crumblingwall. The words were in such Latin as a barbarous age might remember— “Corvinusnecandus est. Cadaver aq(ua) forti dissolvendum, nec aliq(ui)d retinendum. Tace utpotes.” —which may roughly be translated, “Curwen must be killed. The bodymust be dissolved in aqua fortis, nor must anything be retained. Keep silence as best you areable.”

Willett and Mr. Ward were mute and baffled. They had met the unknown, and foundthat 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 bothmen sat still and helpless till the closing of the library forced them to leave. Then they drovelistlessly to the Ward mansion in Prospect Street, and talked to no purpose into the night. Thedoctor rested toward morning, but did not go home. And he was still there Sunday noon when atelephone 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 inperson; 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 theorigin of the strange minuscule message, it seemed certain that the “Curwen” who mustbe destroyed could be no other than the bearded and spectacled stranger. Charles had feared thisman, 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 andunknown source had come a message saying that “Curwen” must be killed and dissolved inacid. The linkage was too unmistakable to be factitious; and besides, was not Allen planning tomurder young Ward upon the advice of the creature called Hutchinson? Of course, the letter they hadseen had never reached the bearded stranger; but from its text they could see that Allen hadalready formed plans for dealing with the youth if he grew too ‘squeamish’. Withoutdoubt, Allen must be apprehended; and even if the most drastic directions were not carried out, hemust be placed where he could inflict no harm upon Charles Ward.

That afternoon, hoping against hope to extract some gleam of information anent theinmost mysteries from the only available one capable of giving it, the father and the doctor wentdown the bay and called on young Charles at the hospital. Simply and gravely Willett told him allhe had found, and noticed how pale he turned as each description made certain the truth of thediscovery. The physician employed as much dramatic effect as he could, and watched for a wincing onCharles’s part when he approached the matter of the covered pits and the nameless hybridswithin. But Ward did not wince. Willett paused, and his voice grew indignant as he spoke of how thethings were starving. He taxed the youth with shocking inhumanity, and shivered when only asardonic laugh came in reply. For Charles, having dropped as useless his pretence that the cryptdid not exist, seemed to see some ghastly jest in this affair; and chuckled hoarsely at somethingwhich amused him. Then he whispered, in accents doubly terrible because of the cracked voice heused, “Damn ’em, they do eat, but they don’t need to! That’sthe rare part! A month, you say, without food? Lud, Sir, you be modest! D’ye know, that wasthe joke on poor old Whipple with his virtuous bluster! Kill everything off, would he? Why, damme,he was half-deaf with the noise from Outside and never saw or heard aught from the wells! He neverdreamed they were there at all! Devil take ye, those cursed things have been howling down thereever 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 almostconvinced against his will, he went on with his tale in the hope that some incident might startlehis auditor out of the mad composure he maintained. Looking at the youth’s face, the doctorcould not but feel a kind of terror at the changes which recent months had wrought. Truly, the boyhad drawn down nameless horrors from the skies. When the room with the formulae and the greenishdust was mentioned, Charles shewed his first sign of animation. A quizzical look overspread hisface as he heard what Willett had read on the pad, and he ventured the mild statement that thosenotes were old ones, of no possible significance to anyone not deeply initiated in the history ofmagic. “But”, he added, “had you but known the words to bring up that which I hadout in the cup, you had not been here to tell me this. ’Twas Number 118, and I conceive youwould have shook had you looked it up in my list in t’other room. ’Twas never raised byme, 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 smokewhich had arisen; and as he did so he saw true fear dawn for the first time on Charles Ward’sface. “It came, and you be here alive?” As Ward croaked the words his voiceseemed 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 replya caution from a letter he remembered. “No. 118, you say? But don’t forget thatstones are all changed now in nine grounds out of ten. You are never sure till youquestion!” And then, without warning, he drew forth the minuscule message and flashed itbefore the patient’s eyes. He could have wished no stronger result, for Charles Ward faintedforthwith.

All this conversation, of course, had been conducted with the greatest secrecylest the resident alienists accuse the father and the physician of encouraging a madman in hisdelusions. Unaided, too, Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward picked up the stricken youth and placed him onthe couch. In reviving, the patient mumbled many times of some word which he must get to Orne andHutchinson at once; so when his consciousness seemed fully back the doctor told him that of thosestrange creatures at least one was his bitter enemy, and had given Dr. Allen advice for hisassassination. This revelation produced no visible effect, and before it was made the visitorscould see that their host had already the look of a hunted man. After that he would converse nomore, so Willett and the father departed presently; leaving behind a caution against the beardedAllen, to which the youth only replied that this individual was very safely taken care of, andcould do no one any harm even if he wished. This was said with an almost evil chuckle very painfulto hear. They did not worry about any communications Charles might indite to that monstrous pair inEurope, since they knew that the hospital authorities seized all outgoing mail for censorship andwould pass no wild or outré-looking missive.

There is, however, a curious sequel to the matter of Orne and Hutchinson, if suchindeed 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 crimesand accidents in Prague and in eastern Transylvania; and after six months believed that he hadfound 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 thedisappearance of the evil old man called Josef Nadek, who had dwelt in it alone ever since anyonecould remember. The other was a titan explosion in the Transylvanian mountains east of Rakus, andthe utter extirpation with all its inmates of the ill-regarded Castle Ferenczy, whose master was sobadly spoken of by peasants and soldiery alike that he would shortly have been summoned toBucharest for serious questioning had not this incident cut off a career already so long as toantedate all common memory. Willett maintains that the hand which wrote those minuscules was ableto wield stronger weapons as well; and that while Curwen was left to him to dispose of, the writerfelt able to find and deal with Orne and Hutchinson itself. Of what their fate may have been thedoctor strives sedulously not to think.

The following morning Dr. Willett hastened to the Ward home to be present when thedetectives arrived. Allen’s destruction or imprisonment—or Curwen’s, if one mightregard 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 weredownstairs this time, for the upper parts of the house were beginning to be shunned because of apeculiar nauseousness which hung indefinitely about; a nauseousness which the older servantsconnected with some curse left by the vanished Curwen portrait.

At nine o’clock the three detectives presented themselves and immediatelydelivered all that they had to say. They had not, regrettably enough, located the Brava Tony Gomesas they had wished, nor had they found the least trace of Dr. Allen’s source or presentwhereabouts; but they had managed to unearth a considerable number of local impressions and factsconcerning the reticent stranger. Allen had struck Pawtuxet people as a vaguely unnatural being,and there was an universal belief that his thick Vandyke beard was either dyed or false—abelief conclusively upheld by the finding of such a false beard, together with a pair of darkglasses, in his room at the fateful bungalow. His voice, Mr. Ward could well testify from his onetelephone conversation, had a depth and hollowness that could not be forgotten; and his glanceseemed malign even through his smoked and horn-rimmed glasses. One shopkeeper, in the course ofnegotiations, 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 themerchant. In connexion with the vampirism rumours of the preceding summer, a majority of thegossips believed that Allen rather than Ward was the actual vampire. Statements were also obtainedfrom the officials who had visited the bungalow after the unpleasant incident of the motor truckrobbery. They had felt less of the sinister in Dr. Allen, but had recognised him as the dominantfigure 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 hadsome slight scar above his dark spectacled right eye. As for the detectives’ search ofAllen’s room, it yielded nothing definite save the beard and glasses, and several pencillednotes in a crabbed writing which Willett at once saw was identical with that shared by the oldCurwen manuscripts and by the voluminous recent notes of young Ward found in the vanished catacombsof horror.

Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward caught something of a profound, subtle, and insidiouscosmic fear from this data as it was gradually unfolded, and almost trembled in following up thevague, mad thought which had simultaneously reached their minds. The false beard andglasses—the crabbed Curwen penmanship—the old portrait and its tiny scar— andthe altered youth in the hospital with such a scar —that deep, hollow voice on thetelephone—was it not of this that Mr. Ward was reminded when his son barked forth thosepitiable 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 suddenlylost his growing fright and began to live wholly at the bungalow?Curwen—Allen—Ward—in what blasphemous and abominable fusion had two ages and twopersons become involved? That damnable resemblance of the picture to Charles—had it not usedto stare and stare, and follow the boy around the room with its eyes? Why, too, did both Allen andCharles copy Joseph Curwen’s handwriting, even when alone and off guard? And then thefrightful work of those people—the lost crypt of horrors that had aged the doctor overnight;the starved monsters in the noisome pits; the awful formula which had yielded such namelessresults; the message in minuscules found in Willett’s pocket; the papers and the letters andall 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 hedid it, he gave the detectives an article to be shewn to such Pawtuxet shopkeepers as had seen theportentous Dr. Allen. That article was a photograph of his luckless son, on which he now carefullydrew in ink the pair of heavy glasses and the black pointed beard which the men had brought fromAllen’s room.

For two hours he waited with the doctor in the oppressive house where fear andmiasma were slowly gathering as the empty panel in the upstairs library leered and leered andleered. 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 theboy called out of the void, and what had it done to him? What, really, had happened from first tolast? Who was this Allen who sought to kill Charles as too ‘squeamish’, and why had hisdestined victim said in the postscript to that frantic letter that he must be so completelyobliterated in acid? Why, too, had the minuscule message, of whose origin no one dared think, saidthat “Curwen” must be likewise obliterated? What was the change, and when hadthe final stage occurred? That day when his frantic note was received—he had been nervous allthe morning, then there was an alteration. He had slipped out unseen and swaggered boldly in pastthe men hired to guard him. That was the time, when he was out. But no—had he not cried outin terror as he entered his study—this very room? What had he found there? Orwait— what had found him? That simulacrum which brushed boldly in without having beenseen to go—was that an alien shadow and a horror forcing itself upon a trembling figure whichhad 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, surelyenough, been a bad business. There had been noises—a cry, a gasp, a choking, and a sort ofclattering or creaking or thumping, or all of these. And Mr. Charles was not the same when hestalked out without a word. The butler shivered as he spoke, and sniffed at the heavy air that blewdown from some open window upstairs. Terror had settled definitely upon the house, and only thebusiness-like detectives failed to imbibe a full measure of it. Even they were restless, for thiscase had held vague elements in the background which pleased them not at all. Dr. Willett wasthinking deeply and rapidly, and his thoughts were terrible ones. Now and then he would almostbreak into muttering as he ran over in his head a new, appalling, and increasingly conclusive chainof nightmare happenings.

Then Mr. Ward made a sign that the conference was over, and everyone save him andthe doctor left the room. It was noon now, but shadows as of coming night seemed to engulf thephantom-haunted mansion. Willett began talking very seriously to his host, and urged that he leavea great deal of the future investigation to him. There would be, he predicted, certain obnoxiouselements which a friend could bear better than a relative. As family physician he must have a freehand, and the first thing he required was a period alone and undisturbed in the abandoned libraryupstairs, where the ancient overmantel had gathered about itself an aura of noisome horror moreintense than when Joseph Curwen’s features themselves glanced slyly down from the paintedpanel.

Mr. Ward, dazed by the flood of grotesque morbidities and unthinkably maddeningsuggestions that poured in upon him from every side, could only acquiesce; and half an hour laterthe 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 finallya 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 keyrattled and Willett appeared in the hall, haggard and ghastly, and demanding wood for the realfireplace on the south wall of the room. The furnace was not enough, he said; and the electric loghad little practical use. Longing yet not daring to ask questions, Mr. Ward gave the requisiteorders and a man brought some stout pine logs, shuddering as he entered the tainted air of thelibrary to place them in the grate. Willett meanwhile had gone up to the dismantled laboratory andbrought down a few odds and ends not included in the moving of the July before. They were in acovered basket, and Mr. Ward never saw what they were.

Then the doctor locked himself in the library once more, and by the clouds ofsmoke which rolled down past the windows from the chimney it was known that he had lighted thefire. 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 ofWillett’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 everyonewished 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 horribleblack smoke swoop down. After an age of waiting the vapours seemed to lighten, and half-formlesssounds of scraping, sweeping, and other minor operations were heard behind the bolted door. And atlast, after the slamming of some cupboard within, Willett made his appearance—sad, pale, andhaggard, and bearing the cloth-draped basket he had taken from the upstairs laboratory. He had leftthe window open, and into that once accursed room was pouring a wealth of pure, wholesome air tomix with a queer new smell of disinfectants. The ancient overmantel still lingered; but it seemedrobbed of malignity now, and rose as calm and stately in its white panelling as if it had neverborne the picture of Joseph Curwen. Night was coming on, yet this time its shadows held no latentfright, but only a gentle melancholy. Of what he had done the doctor would never speak. To Mr. Wardhe 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 asnerve-racking in its way as his hideous wandering in the vanished crypt is shewn by the fact thatthe elderly physician gave out completely as soon as he reached home that evening. For three dayshe rested constantly in his room, though servants later muttered something about having heard himafter 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 anitem in Thursday’s Evening Bulletin which ran as follows:

All day Thursday Dr. Willett rested as if recuperating from something past ornerving himself for something to come. In the evening he wrote a note to Mr. Ward, which wasdelivered 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 reportsand its sinister “purgation”, but he found something calming about the doctor’sletter in spite of the despair it seemed to promise and the fresh mysteries it seemed toevoke.

So on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1928, Marinus Bicknell Willett visited theroom 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 openthe conversation which Willett obviously desired. The doctor’s discovery of the crypt and hismonstrous experience therein had of course created a new source of embarrassment, so that bothhesitated perceptibly after the interchange of a few strained formalities. Then a new element ofconstraint crept in, as Ward seemed to read behind the doctor’s mask-like face a terriblepurpose which had never been there before. The patient quailed, conscious that since the last visitthere had been a change whereby the solicitous family physician had given place to the ruthless andimplacable 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 reckoningis due.”

“Digging again, and coming upon more poor starving pets?” was theironic 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 thebungalow.”

“Excellent”, commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittilyinsulting, “and I trust they proved more becoming than the beard and glasses you now haveon!”

“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 itnow and then useful to be twofold?”

“No”, said Willett gravely, “again you are wrong. It is nobusiness of mine if any man seeks duality; provided he has any right to exist at all, andprovided he does not destroy what called him out of space.”

Ward now started violently. “Well, Sir, what have ye found, and whatd’ye want with me?”

The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his words foran effective answer.

“I have found”, he finally intoned, “something in a cupboardbehind an ancient overmantel where a picture once was, and I have burned it and buried the asheswhere 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 afterthese full two months, with me alive? What d’ye mean to do?”

Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial majesty as hecalmed the patient with a gesture.

“I have told no one. This is no common case—it is a madness out oftime and a horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers or courts or alienists couldever 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, forI know that your accursed magic is true!

“I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the years and fastenedon your double and descendant; I know how you drew him into the past and got him to raise you upfrom your detestable grave; I know how he kept you hidden in his laboratory while you studiedmodern things and roved abroad as a vampire by night, and how you later shewed yourself in beardand glasses that no one might wonder at your godless likeness to him; I know what you resolved todo when he balked at your monstrous rifling of the world’s tombs, and at what you plannedafterward, 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 strangledand hidden him. But you hadn’t reckoned on the different contents of two minds. You were afool, Curwen, to fancy that a mere visual identity would be enough. Why didn’t you think ofthe speech and the voice and the handwriting? It hasn’t worked, you see, after all. You knowbetter than I who or what wrote that message in minuscules, but I will warn you it was not writtenin vain. There are abominations and blasphemies which must be stamped out, and I believe that thewriter 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 inthat very way, and it may be that your own evil magic will undo you all again. Curwen, a mancan’t tamper with Nature beyond certain limits, and every horror you have woven will rise upto wipe you out.”

But here the doctor was cut short by a convulsive cry from the creature beforehim. Hopelessly at bay, weaponless, and knowing that any show of physical violence would bring ascore of attendants to the doctor’s rescue, Joseph Curwen had recourse to his one ancientally, and began a series of cabbalistic motions with his forefingers as his deep, hollow voice, nowunconcealed by feigned hoarseness, bellowed out the opening words of a terrible formula.

But Willett was too quick for him. Even as the dogs in the yard outside began tohowl, and even as a chill wind sprang suddenly up from the bay, the doctor commenced the solemn andmeasured intonation of that which he had meant all along to recite. An eye for an eye—magicfor magic—let the outcome shew how well the lesson of the abyss had been learned! So in aclear voice Marinus Bicknell Willett began the second of that pair of formulae whose firsthad raised the writer of those minuscules—the cryptic invocation whose heading was theDragon’s Tail, sign of the descending node —

At the very first word from Willett’s mouth the previously commenced formulaof the patient stopped short. Unable to speak, the monster made wild motions with his arms untilthey too were arrested. When the awful name of Yog-Sothoth was uttered, the hideous changebegan. It was not merely a dissolution, but rather a transformation orrecapitulation; and Willett shut his eyes lest he faint before the rest of the incantationcould be pronounced.

But he did not faint, and that man of unholy centuries and forbidden secrets nevertroubled the world again. The madness out of time had subsided, and the case of Charles Dexter Wardwas closed. Opening his eyes before staggering out of that room of horror, Dr. Willett saw thatwhat he had kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as he had predicted, been no needfor acids. For like his accursed picture a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on thefloor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.

H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dreamlands Cycle” is a series of interconnected stories that transport readers to a fantastical, otherworldly realm known as theDreamlands. This dimension, accessible through dreams, is a place where the boundaries of reality are fluid and the imagination reigns supreme.Unlike the grim and often nihilistic tone of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, the Dreamlands Cycle often explores themes of wonder, beauty, and cosmicadventure, albeit still tinged with the author’s characteristic sense of the uncanny and the unknown. Central to these tales is the character ofRandolph Carter, a recurring protagonist who embarks on epic quests and journeys through this surreal landscape, encountering a myriad of bizarreand enigmatic beings, ancient cities, and forgotten gods.

The Dreamlands are depicted as a vast, timeless expanse where dreamers can traverse fantastical lands such as the serene city of Celephaïs, theenchanted forest of the Zoogs, and the perilous Plateau of Leng. Lovecraft’s richly imaginative descriptions and mythic storytelling create a vividand immersive world that contrasts sharply with the stark, indifferent cosmos of his other works. The Dreamlands Cycle includes some of Lovecraft’smost poetic and evocative writing, capturing the essence of human yearning for the sublime and the eternal struggle against the limitations ofmundane existence. Through these stories, Lovecraft explores the power of dreams as a gateway to deeper truths and greater horrors, reflecting hisown fascination with the mysteries that lie beyond the waking world.

List of stories in the Dreamlands Cycle

The stories in the Dreamlands Cycle are not typically ordered by their internal chronology, as Lovecraft’s works do not form a single continuousnarrative. Instead, they are usually listed by their publication date or grouped by thematic relevance.For your reading convenience, the stories in this book are ordered in a way that is more-or-less consistent with the main events in the LovecraftMythos. This ordering places the stories in a sequence that emphasizes their mythos connections and development of key themes and elements withinLovecraft’s universe.

Primary Works in the Dreamlands Cycle

Additional Stories Related to the Dream Cycle

While the above stories are the primary works associated with the Dream Cycle, a few other stories also touch upon the Dreamlands or similar themes.These stories, while not always directly connected, share a thematic and stylistic kinship, creating a cohesive body of work centered around themysteries and wonders of the Dreamlands.

Into the north window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light. All through thelong hellish hours of blackness it shines there. And in the autumn of the year, when the windsfrom the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the swamp mutter things to one anotherin the small hours of the morning under the horned waning moon, I sit by the casem*nt and watchthat star. Down from the heights reels the glittering Cassiopeia as the hours wear on, whileCharles’ 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 ComaBerenices shimmers weirdly afar off in the mysterious east; but still the Pole Star leers downfrom the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye whichstrives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a messageto convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep.

Well do I remember the night of the great Aurora, when over the swamp playedthe shocking coruscations of the daemon-light. After the beams 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 betwixt strange peaks. Of ghastlymarble were its walls and its towers, its columns, domes, and pavements. In the marble streetswere 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 thatwatching 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 nobleand familiar, walked abroad, and under the horned waning moon men talked wisdom in a tonguewhich I understood, though it was unlike any language I had ever known. And when the red Aldebaranhad 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 visionof the city, and within my soul had arisen another and vaguer recollection, of whose natureI was not then certain. Thereafter, on the cloudy nights when I could sleep, I saw the cityoften; sometimes under that horned waning moon, and sometimes under the hot yellow rays of asun which did not set, but which wheeled low around the horizon. And on the clear nights thePole Star leered as never before.

Gradually I came to wonder what might be my place in that city on the strangeplateau betwixt strange peaks. At first content to view the scene as an all-observant uncorporealpresence, I now desired to define my relation to it, and to speak my mind amongst the gravemen 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 andbrick south of the sinister swamp and the cemetery on the low hillock, where the Pole Star peersinto my north window each night?”

One night as I listened to the discourse in the large square containing manystatues, I felt a change; and perceived that I had at last a bodily form. Nor was I a strangerin the streets of Olathoë, which lies on the plateau of Sarkis, betwixt the peaks Notonand 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 hadappeared out of the unknown west to ravage the confines of our kingdom, and finally to besiegeour towns. Having taken the fortified places at the foot of the mountains, their way now layopen to the plateau, unless every citizen could resist with the strength of ten men. For thesquat creatures were mighty in the arts of war, and knew not the scruples of honour which heldback our tall, grey-eyed men of Lomar from ruthless conquest.

Alos, my friend, was commander of all the forces on the plateau, and in himlay the last hope of our country. On this occasion he spoke of the perils to be faced, and exhortedthe men of Olathoë, 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 (evenas our descendants must some day flee from the land of Lomar), valiantly and victoriously sweptaside the hairy, long-armed, cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in their way. To me Alos denied awarrior’s part, for I was feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to stressand hardships. But my eyes were the keenest in the city, despite the long hours I gave eachday to the study of the Pnakotic manuscripts and the wisdom of the Zobnarian Fathers; so myfriend, desiring not to doom me to inaction, rewarded me with that duty which was second tonothing in importance. To the watch-tower of Thapnen he sent me, there to serve as the eyesof our army. Should the Inutos attempt to gain the citadel by the narrow pass behind the peakNoton, and thereby surprise the garrison, I was to give the signal of fire which would warnthe waiting soldiers and save the town from immediate disaster.

Alone I mounted the tower, for every man of stout body was needed in the passesbelow. 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 of Olathoëthat lies betwixt the peaks of Noton and Kadiphonek.

But as I stood in the tower’s topmost chamber, I beheld the horned waningmoon, red and sinister, quivering through the vapours that hovered over the distant valley ofBanof. 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, soothingme to traitorous somnolence with a damnable rhythmical promise which it repeated over and over:

Vainly did I struggle with my drowsiness, seeking to connect these strange words with some loreof the skies which I had learnt from the Pnakotic manuscripts. My head, heavy and reeling, droopedto my breast, and when next I looked up it was in a dream; with the Pole Star grinning at methrough a window from over the horrible swaying trees of a dream-swamp. And I am still dreaming.

In my shame and despair I sometimes scream frantically, begging the dream-creaturesaround me to waken me ere the Inutos steal up the pass behind the peak Noton and take the citadelby 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 duty and betrayed the marble city of Olathoë; I have proven false toAlos, my friend and commander. But still these shadows of my dream deride me. They say thereis no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings; that in those realms where the Pole Starshines high and red Aldebaran crawls low around the horizon, there has been naught save iceand snow for thousands of years, and never a man save squat yellow creatures, blighted by thecold, whom they call “Esquimaux”.

And as I writhe in my guilty agony, frantic to save the city whose peril everymoment grows, and vainly striving to shake off this unnatural dream of a house of stone andbrick 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 strivesto convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.

There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream and out of which nostream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, butSarnath stands there no more.

It is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before everthe men of Sarnath came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the grey stonecity 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 andrudely fashioned. It is written on the brick cylinders of Kadatheron that the beings of Ib werein 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 descendedone night from the moon in a mist; they and the vast still lake and grey stone city Ib. Howeverthis may be, it is certain that they worshipped a sea-green stone idol chiselled in the likenessof 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 thereafterkindled flames on many ceremonial occasions. But not much is written of these beings, becausethey lived in very ancient times, and man is young, and knows little of the very ancient livingthings.

After many aeons men came to the land of Mnar; dark shepherd folk with theirfleecy flocks, who built Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai. And certaintribes, more hardy than the rest, pushed on to the border of the lake and built Sarnath at aspot where precious metals were found in the earth.

Not far from the grey city of Ib did the wandering tribes lay the first stonesof Sarnath, and at the beings of Ib they marvelled greatly. But with their marvelling was mixedhate, for they thought it not meet that beings of such aspect should walk about the world ofmen at dusk. Nor did they like the strange sculptures upon the grey monoliths of Ib, for thosesculptures were terrible with great antiquity. Why the beings and the sculptures lingered solate in the world, even until the coming of men, none can tell; unless it was because the landof 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, andit was not less because they found the beings weak, and soft as jelly to the touch of stonesand spears and arrows. So one day the young warriors, the slingers and the spearmen and thebowmen, marched against Ib and slew all the inhabitants thereof, pushing the queer bodies intothe lake with long spears, because they did not wish to touch them. And because they did notlike the grey sculptured monoliths of Ib they cast these also into the lake; wondering fromthe greatness of the labour how ever the stones were brought from afar, as they must have been,since there is naught like them in all the land of Mnar or in the lands adjacent.

Thus of the very ancient city of Ib was nothing spared save the sea-green stoneidol chiselled in the likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard. This the young warriors took backwith them to Sarnath as a symbol of conquest over the old gods and beings of Ib, and a signof leadership in Mnar. But on the night after it was set up in the temple a terrible thing musthave happened, for weird lights were seen over the lake, and in the morning the people foundthe idol gone, and the high-priest Taran-Ish lying dead, as from some fear unspeakable. Andbefore he died, Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite with coarse shaky strokesthe sign of DOOM.

After Taran-Ish there were many high-priests in Sarnath, but never was thesea-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 ofchrysolite. Betwixt Sarnath and the city of Ilarnek arose a caravan route, and the preciousmetals from the earth were exchanged for other metals and rare cloths and jewels and books andtools for artificers and all things of luxury that are known to the people who dwell along thewinding river Ai and beyond. So Sarnath waxed mighty and learned and beautiful, and sent forthconquering armies to subdue the neighbouring cities; and in time there sate upon a throne inSarnath 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 300 cubits and in breadth 75, sothat chariots might pass each other as men drave them along the top. For full 500 stadia didthey run, being open only on the side toward the lake; where a green stone sea-wall kept backthe waves that rose oddly once a year at the festival of the destroying of Ib. In Sarnath werefifty 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, whichwere 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 nolonger known among men. The houses of Sarnath were of glazed brick and chalcedony, each havingits walled garden and crystal lakelet. With strange art were they builded, for no other cityhad houses like them; and travellers from Thraa and Ilarnek and Kadatheron marvelled at theshining domes wherewith they were surmounted.

But more marvellous still were the palaces and the temples, and the gardensmade by Zokkar the olden king. There were many palaces, the least of which were mightier thanany in Thraa or Ilarnek or Kadatheron. So high were they that one within might sometimes fancyhimself beneath only the sky; yet when lighted with torches dipt in the oil of Dothur theirwalls shewed vast paintings of kings and armies, of a splendour at once inspiring and stupefyingto the beholder. Many were the pillars of the palaces, all of tinted marble, and carven intodesigns of surpassing beauty. And in most of the palaces the floors were mosaics of beryl andlapis-lazuli and sardonyx and carbuncle and other choice materials, so disposed that the beholdermight 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 otherswas the palace of the kings of Mnar and of the lands adjacent. On a pair of golden crouchinglions rested the throne, many steps above the gleaming floor. And it was wrought of one pieceof ivory, though no man lives who knows whence so vast a piece could have come. In that palacethere were also many galleries, and many amphitheatres where lions and men and elephants battledat the pleasure of the kings. Sometimes the amphitheatres were flooded with water conveyed fromthe lake in mighty aqueducts, and then were enacted stirring sea-fights, or combats betwixtswimmers and deadly marine things.

Lofty and amazing were the seventeen tower-like temples of Sarnath, fashionedof a bright multi-coloured stone not known elsewhere. A full thousand cubits high stood thegreatest among them, wherein the high-priests dwelt with a magnificence scarce less than thatof the kings. On the ground were halls as vast and splendid as those of the palaces; where gatheredthrongs in worship of Zo-Kalar and Tamash and Lobon, the chief gods of Sarnath, whose incense-envelopedshrines were as the thrones of monarchs. Not like the eikons of other gods were those of Zo-Kalarand Tamash and Lobon, for so close to life were they that one might swear the graceful beardedgods themselves sate on the ivory thrones. And up unending steps of shining zircon was the tower-chamber,wherefrom the high-priests looked out over the city and the plains and the lake by day; andat the cryptic moon and significant stars and planets, and their reflections in the lake, bynight. 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 centreof Sarnath they lay, covering a great space and encircled by a high wall. And they were surmountedby a mighty dome of glass, through which shone the sun and moon and stars and planets when itwas clear, and from which were hung fulgent images of the sun and moon and stars and planetswhen it was not clear. In summer the gardens were cooled with fresh odorous breezes skilfullywafted by fans, and in winter they were heated with concealed fires, so that in those gardensit was always spring. There ran little streams over bright pebbles, dividing meads of greenand gardens of many hues, and spanned by a multitude of bridges. Many were the waterfalls intheir courses, and many were the lilied lakelets into which they expanded. Over the streamsand lakelets rode white swans, whilst the music of rare birds chimed in with the melody of thewaters. In ordered terraces rose the green banks, adorned here and there with bowers of vinesand sweet blossoms, and seats and benches of marble and porphyry. And there were many smallshrines 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 honours werethen paid to the shades of those who had annihilated the odd ancient beings, and the memoryof those beings and of their elder gods was derided by dancers and lutanists crowned with rosesfrom the gardens of Zokkar. And the kings would look out over the lake and curse the bones ofthe dead that lay beneath it. At first the high-priests liked not these festivals, for therehad descended amongst them queer tales of how the sea-green eikon had vanished, and how Taran-Ishhad died from fear and left a warning. And they said that from their high tower they sometimessaw lights beneath the waters of the lake. But as many years passed without calamity even thepriests 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 ofthe world and pride of all mankind.

Gorgeous beyond thought was the feast of the thousandth year of the destroyingof Ib. For a decade had it been talked of in the land of Mnar, and as it drew nigh there cameto Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants men from Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron, and allthe cities of Mnar and the lands beyond. Before the marble walls on the appointed night werepitched the pavilions of princes and the tents of travellers, and all the shore resounded withthe song of happy revellers. Within his banquet-hall reclined Nargis-Hei, the king, drunkenwith ancient wine from the vaults of conquered Pnath, and surrounded by feasting nobles andhurrying slaves. There were eaten many strange delicacies at that feast; peaco*cks from the islesof Nariel in the Middle Ocean, young goats from the distant hills of Implan, heels of camelsfrom the Bnazic desert, nuts and spices from Cydathrian groves, and pearls from wave-washedMtal dissolved in the vinegar of Thraa. Of sauces there were an untold number, prepared by thesubtlest cooks in all Mnar, and suited to the palate of every feaster. But most prized of allthe viands were the great fishes from the lake, each of vast size, and served up on golden plattersset with rubies and diamonds.

Whilst the king and his nobles feasted within the palace, and viewed the crowningdish as it awaited them on golden platters, others feasted elsewhere. In the tower of the greattemple the priests held revels, and in pavilions without the walls the princes of neighbouringlands made merry. And it was the high-priest Gnai-Kah who first saw the shadows that descendedfrom the gibbous moon into the lake, and the damnable green mists that arose from the lake tomeet the moon and to shroud in a sinister haze the towers and the domes of fated Sarnath. Thereafterthose in the towers and without the walls beheld strange lights on the water, and saw that thegrey 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 downand folded their tents and pavilions and departed for the river Ai, though they scarce knewthe reason for their departing.

Then, close to the hour of midnight, all the bronze gates of Sarnath burstopen and emptied forth a frenzied throng that blackened the plain, so that all the visitingprinces and travellers fled away in fright. For on the faces of this throng was writ a madnessborn of horror unendurable, and on their tongues were words so terrible that no hearer pausedfor proof. Men whose eyes were wild with fear shrieked aloud of the sight within the king’sbanquet-hall, where through the windows were seen no longer the forms of Nargis-Hei and hisnobles 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 plattersset with rubies and diamonds containing uncouth flames. And the princes and travellers, as theyfled from the doomed city of Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants, looked again upon themist-begetting lake and saw the grey rock Akurion was quite submerged.

Through all the land of Mnar and the lands adjacent spread the tales of thosewho had fled from Sarnath, and caravans sought that accursed city and its precious metals nomore. It was long ere any traveller went thither, and even then only the brave and adventurousyoung men of distant Falona dared make the journey; adventurous young men of yellow hair andblue 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 grey rock Akurion which rears highabove it near the shore, they beheld not the wonder of the world and pride of all mankind. Whereonce had risen walls of 300 cubits and towers yet higher, now stretched only the marshy shore,and where once had dwelt fifty millions of men now crawled only the detestable green water-lizard.Not even the mines of precious metal remained, for DOOM had come to Sarnath.

But half buried in the rushes was spied a curious green idol of stone; an exceedinglyancient idol coated with seaweed and chiselled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard.That idol, enshrined in the high temple at Ilarnek, was subsequently worshipped beneath thegibbous moon throughout the land of Mnar.

I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather kept beforeme. Far from the shore stands the grey lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks that are seen whenthe tide is low, but unseen when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a century have sweptthe majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in thedays 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 shoreswhere warm suns shine and sweet odours linger about strange gardens and gay temples. The oldcaptains of the sea came often to my grandfather and told him of these things, which in turnhe told to my father, and my father told to me in the long autumn evenings when the wind howledeerily from the East. And I have read more of these things, and of many things besides, in thebooks 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 secretlore of ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that oceanis not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At firstit told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the yearsit grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant inspace and in time. Sometimes at twilight the grey vapours of the horizon have parted to grantme glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grownclear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath. And these glimpses havebeen as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; forocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams ofTime.

Out of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the moon wasfull and high in the heavens. Out of the South it would glide very smoothly and silently overthe 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 ofoars moving rhythmically. One night I espied upon the deck a man, bearded and robed, and heseemed to beckon me to embark for fair unknown shores. Many times afterward I saw him underthe full moon, and ever did he beckon me.

Very brightly did the moon shine on the night I answered the call, and I walkedout over the waters to the White Ship on a bridge of moonbeams. The man who had beckoned nowspoke a welcome to me in a soft language I seemed to know well, and the hours were filled withsoft songs of the oarsmen as we glided away into a mysterious South, golden with the glow ofthat full, mellow moon.

And when the day dawned, rosy and effulgent, I beheld the green shore of farlands, 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 strangetemples. As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the Land ofZar, 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 sightsbefore me were many things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescentdepths 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 seenand dreamed. But we did not set foot upon the sloping meadows of Zar, for it is told that hewho treads them may nevermore return to his native shore.

As the White Ship sailed silently away from the templed terraces of Zar, webeheld on the distant horizon ahead the spires of a mighty city; and the bearded man said tome: “This is Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, wherein reside all those mysteriesthat man has striven in vain to fathom.” And I looked again, at closer range, and sawthat the city was greater than any city I had known or dreamed of before. Into the sky the spiresof its temples reached, so that no man might behold their peaks; and far back beyond the horizonstretched the grim, grey 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 fascinatingyet repellent city, and besought the bearded man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carvengate Akariel; but he gently denied my wish, saying: “Into Thalarion, the City of a ThousandWonders, many have passed but none returned. Therein walk only daemons and mad things that areno longer men, and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those who have looked uponthe eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.” So the White Ship sailed on past the wallsof Thalarion, and followed for many days a southward-flying bird, whose glossy plumage matchedthe sky out of which it had appeared.

Then came we to a pleasant coast gay with blossoms of every hue, where as farinland as we could see basked lovely groves and radiant arbours beneath a meridian sun. Frombowers beyond our view came bursts of song and snatches of lyric harmony, interspersed withfaint 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. Suddenlya 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 odour of plague-strickentowns and uncovered cemeteries. And as we sailed madly away from that damnable coast the beardedman 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 blessedseas 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 distantnight when we sailed away from my far native land. And it was by moonlight that we anchoredat last in the harbour of Sona-Nyl, which is guarded by twin headlands of crystal that risefrom the sea and meet in a resplendent arch. This is the Land of Fancy, and we walked to theverdant shore upon a golden bridge of moonbeams.

In the Land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither sufferingnor death; and there I dwelt for many aeons. Green are the groves and pastures, bright and fragrantthe flowers, blue and musical the streams, clear and cool the fountains, and stately and gorgeousthe temples, castles, and cities of Sona-Nyl. Of that land there is no bound, for beyond eachvista of beauty rises another more beautiful. Over the countryside and amidst the splendourof cities rove at will the happy folk, of whom all are gifted with unmarred grace and unalloyedhappiness. For the aeons that I dwelt there I wandered blissfully through gardens where quaintpagodas peep from pleasing clumps of bushes, and where the white walks are bordered with delicateblossoms. 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 citiesglittering on the infinitely distant horizon. And I viewed by moonlight the sparkling sea, thecrystal headlands, and the placid harbour wherein lay anchored the White Ship.

It was against the full moon one night in the immemorial year of Tharp thatI 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; orat least so men relate. But the bearded man said to me: “Beware of those perilous seaswherein men say Cathuria lies. In Sona-Nyl there is no pain nor death, but who can tell whatlies beyond the basalt pillars of the West?” Natheless at the next full moon I boardedthe White Ship, and with the reluctant bearded man left the happy harbour for untravelled seas.

And the bird of heaven flew before, and led us toward the basalt pillars ofthe West, but this time the oarsmen sang no soft songs under the full moon. In my mind I wouldoften picture the unknown Land of Cathuria with its splendid groves and palaces, and would wonderwhat new delights there awaited me. “Cathuria”, I would say to myself, “isthe 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 carvenand painted glories, and having in their courtyards cool fountains of silver, where purl withravishing music the scented waters that come from the grotto-born river Narg. And the citiesof Cathuria are cinctured with golden walls, and their pavements also are of gold. In the gardensof these cities are strange orchids, and perfumed lakes whose beds are of coral and amber. Atnight the streets and the gardens are lit with gay lanthorns fashioned from the three-colouredshell of the tortoise, and here resound the soft notes of the singer and the lutanist. And thehouses of the cities of Cathuria are all palaces, each built over a fragrant canal bearing thewaters of the sacred Narg. Of marble and porphyry are the houses, and roofed with glitteringgold that reflects the rays of the sun and enhances the splendour of the cities as blissfulgods view them from the distant peaks. Fairest of all is the palace of the great monarch Dorieb,whom some say to be a demigod and others a god. High is the palace of Dorieb, and many are theturrets of marble upon its walls. In its wide halls many multitudes assemble, and here hangthe 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 seemsto gaze upon the living Olympus. And the floor of the palace is of glass, under which flow thecunningly lighted waters of the Narg, gay with gaudy fish not known beyond the bounds of lovelyCathuria.”

Thus would I speak to myself of Cathuria, but ever would the bearded man warnme to turn back to the happy shores of Sona-Nyl; for Sona-Nyl is known of men, while none hathever beheld Cathuria.

And on the thirty-first day that we followed the bird, we beheld the basaltpillars of the West. Shrouded in mist they were, so that no man might peer beyond them or seetheir summits—which indeed some say reach even to the heavens. And the bearded man againimplored me to turn back, but I heeded him not; for from the mists beyond the basalt pillarsI fancied there came the notes of singer and lutanist; sweeter than the sweetest songs of Sona-Nyl,and sounding mine own praises; the praises of me, who had voyaged far under the full moon anddwelt in the Land of Fancy.

So to the sound of melody the White Ship sailed into the mist betwixt the basaltpillars of the West. And when the music ceased and the mist lifted, we beheld not the Land ofCathuria, but a swift-rushing resistless sea, over which our helpless barque was borne towardsome unknown goal. Soon to our ears came the distant thunder of falling waters, and to our eyesappeared on the far horizon ahead the titanic spray of a monstrous cataract, wherein the oceansof the world drop down to abysmal nothingness. Then did the bearded man say to me with tearson his cheek: “We have rejected the beautiful Land of Sona-Nyl, which we may never beholdagain. The gods are greater than men, and they have conquered.”And I closed my eyes beforethe crash that I knew would come, shutting out the sight of the celestial bird which flappedits mocking blue wings over the brink of the torrent.

Out of that crash came darkness, and I heard the shrieking of men and of thingswhich were not men. From the East tempestuous winds arose, and chilled me as I crouched on theslab of damp stone which had risen beneath my feet. Then as I heard another crash I opened myeyes and beheld myself upon the platform of that lighthouse from whence I had sailed so manyaeons ago. In the darkness below there loomed the vast blurred outlines of a vessel breakingup on the cruel rocks, and as I glanced out over the waste I saw that the light had failed forthe first time since my grandfather had assumed its care.

And in the later watches of the night, when I went within the tower, I sawon 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 foundwas only this: a strange dead bird whose hue was as of the azure sky, and a single shatteredspar, 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 timessince has the moon shone full and high in the heavens, the White Ship from the South came neveragain.

It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and thisI can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat iscryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus,and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’slords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and hespeaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hathforgotten.

In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dweltan old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Whythey did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take itill 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 theirhovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the mannerof slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with theold man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, andbecause their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back ofa neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared themmore; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished petor mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidableoversight 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 cobbledstreets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed throughthe village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and boughtgay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it wasseen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of theirwagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. Andthe leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.

There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, butonly a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him thissmall furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great reliefin the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiledmore often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddlypainted wagon.

On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could notfind his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of theold man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbinggave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun andprayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try veryhard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapesthe clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition thereseemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creaturescrowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.

That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householderswere troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. Fromeach 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 inrevenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. ButNith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons tosuspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complainto the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he hadat twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowlyand solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-ofrite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and thoughthey feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chidethe old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.

So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked 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 purringcontent. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. OldKranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not returnalive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that therefusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedinglycurious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but onlydoze by the fire or in the sun.

It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearingat dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no onehad seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomasterdecided 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 cutterof stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: twocleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawlingin 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 overwhelmedwith questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and givena 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 thecottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.

And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of bytraders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may killa cat.

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peakoverlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward the distantregions 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 newname; 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 remind him who he had been. His money and lands weregone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and writeof his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a timehe kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from theworld about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile totry 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 shew in naked uglinessthe foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failedto reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid thenebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in thestories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formedthoughts, 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, offountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains thatstretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes thatride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we havelooked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we werewise and unhappy.

Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreamingof the house where he was born; the great stone house covered with ivy, where thirteen generationsof his ancestors had lived, and where he had hoped to die. It was moonlight, and he had stolenout into the fragrant summer night, through the gardens, down the terraces, past the great oaksof the park, and along the long white road to the village. The village seemed very old, eatenaway at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane, and Kuranes wondered whether thepeaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or death. In the streets were spears of long grass,and the window-panes on either side were either broken or filmily staring. Kuranes had not lingered,but had plodded on as though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons forfear it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do notlead to any goal. Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street towardthe channel cliffs, and had come to the end of things—to the precipice and the abyss whereall the village and all the world fell abruptly into the unechoing emptiness of infinity, andwhere even the sky ahead was empty and unlit by the crumbling moon and the peering stars. Faithhad 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 dreameddreams, and laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the worlds. Thena rift seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw the city of the valley, glisteningradiantly far, far below, with a background of sea and sky, and a snow-capped mountain nearthe shore.

Kuranes had awaked the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from hisbrief glance that it was none other than Celephaîs, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai beyondthe Tanarian Hills, where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoonvery long ago, when he had slipt away from his nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him tosleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village. He had protested then, whenthey had found him, waked him, and carried him home, for just as he was aroused he had beenabout to sail in a golden galley for those alluring regions where the sea meets the sky. Andnow he was equally resentful of awaking, for he had found his fabulous city after forty wearyyears.

But three nights afterward Kuranes came again to Celephaîs. As before,he dreamed first of the village that was asleep or dead, and of the abyss down which one mustfloat 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 treesof Mount Aran swaying in the sea-breeze. But this time he was not snatched away, and like awinged being settled gradually over a grassy hillside till finally his feet rested gently onthe turf. He had indeed come back to the Valley of Ooth-Nargai and the splendid city of Celephaîs.

Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kuranes, overthe 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 sentrieson the ramparts were the same, and still as young as he remembered them. When he entered thecity, past the bronze gates and over the onyx pavements, the merchants and camel-drivers greetedhim 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 perpetualyouth. Then Kuranes walked through the Street of Pillars to the seaward wall, where gatheredthe traders and sailors, and strange men from the regions where the sea meets the sky. Therehe stayed long, gazing out over the bright harbour where the ripples sparkled beneath an unknownsun, and where rode lightly the galleys from far places over the water. And he gazed also uponMount Aran rising regally from the shore, its lower slopes green with swaying trees and itswhite summit touching the sky.

More than ever Kuranes wished to sail in a galley to the far places of whichhe had heard so many strange tales, and he sought again the captain who had agreed to carryhim so long ago. He found the man, Athib, sitting on the same chest of spices he had sat uponbefore, and Athib seemed not to realise that any time had passed. Then the two rowed to a galleyin the harbour, and giving orders to the oarsmen, commenced to sail out into the billowy CerenerianSea that leads to the sky. For several days they glided undulatingly over the water, till finallythey came to the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. Here the galley paused not at all, butfloated easily in the blue of the sky among fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneaththe keel Kuranes could see strange lands and rivers and cities of surpassing beauty, spreadindolently in the sunshine which seemed never to lessen or disappear. At length Athib told himthat 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 windflows into the sky; but as the highest of the city’s carven towers came into sight therewas a sound somewhere in space, and Kuranes awaked in his London garret.

For many months after that Kuranes sought the marvellous city of Celephaîsand its sky-bound galleys in vain; and though his dreams carried him to many gorgeous and unheard-ofplaces, 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 greatdistances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders; and in the wildestpart of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he found a hideouslyancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges and valleys; too gigantic everto have risen by human hands, and of such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyondthat wall in the grey dawn he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when thesun 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 momentforgot Celephaîs in sheer delight. But he remembered it again when he walked down a whitepath toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would have questioned the people of that land about it,had he not found that there were no people there, but only birds and bees and butterflies. Onanother night Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came to a towerwindow overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the silent city thatspread away from the river-bank he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he hadknown before. He would have descended and asked the way to Ooth-Nargai had not a fearsome aurorasputtered up from some remote place beyond the horizon, shewing the ruin and antiquity of thecity, and the stagnation of the reedy river, and the death lying upon that land, as it had lainsince King Kynaratholis came home from his conquests to find the vengeance of the gods.

So Kuranes sought fruitlessly for the marvellous city of Celephaîs andits galleys that sail to Serannian in the sky, meanwhile seeing many wonders and once barelyescaping from the high-priest not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over itsface and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery on the cold desert plateau of Leng.In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in orderto increase his periods of sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a partof 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 onefrom the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist. Kuranes was now very anxiousto return to minaret-studded Celephaîs, and increased his doses of drugs; but eventuallyhe had no more money left, and could buy no drugs. Then one summer day he was turned out ofhis garret, and wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a place wherethe houses grew thinner and thinner. And it was there that fulfilment came, and he met the cortegeof knights come from Celephaîs to bear him thither forever.

Handsome knights they were, astride roan horses and clad in shining armourwith tabards of cloth-of-gold curiously emblazoned. So numerous were they, that Kuranes almostmistook them for an army, but their leader told him they were sent in his honour; since it washe who had created Ooth-Nargai in his dreams, on which account he was now to be appointed itschief 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 Kuranesand his ancestors were born. It was very strange, but as the riders went on they seemed to gallopback through Time; for whenever they passed through a village in the twilight they saw onlysuch houses and villages as Chaucer or men before him might have seen, and sometimes they sawknights on horseback with small companies of retainers. When it grew dark they travelled moreswiftly, till soon they were flying uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came uponthe village which Kuranes had seen alive in his childhood, and asleep or dead in his dreams.It was alive now, and early villagers courtesied as the horsem*n clattered down the street andturned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dream. Kuranes had previously entered thatabyss only at night, and wondered what it would look like by day; so he watched anxiously asthe column approached its brink. Just as they galloped up the rising ground to the precipicea golden glare came somewhere out of the east and hid all the landscape in its effulgent draperies.The abyss was now a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendour, and invisible voices sangexultantly as the knightly entourage plunged over the edge and floated gracefully down pastglittering clouds and silvery coruscations. Endlessly down the horsem*n floated, their chargerspawing the aether as if galloping over golden sands; and then the luminous vapours spread apartto reveal a greater brightness, the brightness of the city Celephaîs, and the sea-coastbeyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail outof the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky.

And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighbouring regionsof dream, and held his court alternately in Celephaîs and in the cloud-fashioned Serannian.He reigns there still, and will reign happily forever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouththe channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-desertedvillage 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 atmosphereof extinct nobility.

When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madnesslike the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim’sbody, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I hadvainly 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 sailedendlessly and languorously under strange stars.

Once when the gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream underthe 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 pausein the spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely, and the greyground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, sometimes disclosing the mould-stained stones ofburied temples. And always the goal of my fancies was the mighty vine-grown wall with the littlegate of bronze therein.

After a while, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from theirgreyness and sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowygroves, and wonder how I might seize them for my eternal dwelling-place, so that I need no morecrawl back to a dull world stripped of interest and new colours. And as I looked upon the littlegate 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 theivied antique wall, though it was exceedingly well hidden. And I would tell myself that therealm 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 filledwith the thoughts of dream-sages who dwelt of old in that city, and who were too wise ever tobe 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 wallpierced by a little bronze gate. When I saw this lore, I knew that it touched on the scenesI had haunted, and I therefore read long in the yellowed papyrus.

Some of the dream-sages wrote gorgeously of the wonders beyond the irrepassablegate, but others told of horror and disappointment. I knew not which to believe, yet longedmore and more to cross forever into the unknown land; for doubt and secrecy are the lure oflures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. Sowhen I learned of the drug which would unlock the gate and drive me through, I resolved to takeit when next I awaked.

Last night I swallowed the drug and floated dreamily into the golden valleyand the shadowy groves; and when I came this time to the antique wall, I saw that the smallgate of bronze was ajar. From beyond came a glow that weirdly lit the giant twisted trees andthe tops of the buried temples, and I drifted on songfully, expectant of the glories of theland from whence I should never return.

But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of drug and dream pushed me through,I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was neither land norsea, but only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space. So, happier than I had everdared hoped to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from whichthe daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.

Into the granite city of Teloth wandered the youth, vine-crowned, his yellow hair glisteningwith myrrh and his purple robe torn with briers of the mountain Sidrak that lies across theantique bridge of stone. The men of Teloth are dark and stern, and dwell in square houses, andwith frowns they asked the stranger whence he had come and what were his name and fortune. Sothe youth answered:

“I am Iranon, and come from Aira, a far city that I recall only dimlybut seek to find again. I am a singer of songs that I learned in the far city, and my callingis to make beauty with the things remembered of childhood. My wealth is in little memories anddreams, and in hopes that I sing in gardens when the moon is tender and the west wind stirsthe lotos-buds.”

When the men of Teloth heard these things they whispered to one another; forthough in the granite city there is no laughter or song, the stern men sometimes look to theKarthian hills in the spring and think of the lutes of distant Oonai whereof travellers havetold. And thinking thus, they bade the stranger stay and sing in the square before the Towerof Mlin, though they liked not the colour of his tattered robe, nor the myrrh in his hair, norhis chaplet of vine-leaves, nor the youth in his golden voice. At evening Iranon sang, and whilehe 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 away to sleep; for Iranontold nothing useful, singing only his memories, his dreams, and his hopes.

“I remember the twilight, the moon, and soft songs, and the window whereI was rocked to sleep. And through the window was the street where the golden lights came, andwhere 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 in the moonbeams when my mothersang 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.”

“O Aira, city of marble and beryl, how many are thy beauties! How lovedI the warm and fragrant groves across the hyaline Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra thatflowed through the verdant valley! In those groves and in that vale the children wove wreathsfor one another, and at dusk I dreamed strange dreams under the yath-trees on the mountain asI saw below me the lights of the city, and the curving Nithra reflecting a ribbon of stars.”

“And in the city were palaces of veined and tinted marble, with goldendomes and painted walls, and green gardens with cerulean pools and crystal fountains. OftenI played in the gardens and waded in the pools, and lay and dreamed among the pale flowers underthe trees. And sometimes at sunset I would climb the long hilly street to the citadel and theopen place, and look down upon Aira, the magic city of marble and beryl, splendid in a robeof golden flame.”

“Long have I missed thee, Aira, for I was but young when we went intoexile; 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 turnaway. 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 morningan archon came to him and told him to go to the shop of Athok the cobbler, and be apprenticedto him.

“But I am Iranon, a singer of songs”, he said, “and haveno heart for the cobbler’s trade.”

“All in Teloth must toil”, replied the archon, “for thatis the law.” Then said Iranon,

“Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And ifye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is notlife made of beauty and song? And if ye suffer no singers among you, where shall be the fruitsof your toil? Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death morepleasing?” But the archon was sullen and did not understand, and rebuked the stranger.

“Thou art a strange youth, and I like not thy face nor thy voice. Thewords thou speakest are blasphemy, for the gods of Teloth have said that toil is good. Our godshave promised us a haven of light beyond death, where there shall be rest without end, and crystalcoldness amidst which none shall vex his mind with thought or his eyes with beauty. Go thouthen to Athok the cobbler or be gone out of the city by sunset. All here must serve, and songis folly.”

So Iranon went out of the stable and walked over the narrow stone streets betweenthe gloomy square houses of granite, seeking something green in the air of spring. But in Telothwas nothing green, for all was of stone. On the faces of men were frowns, but by the stone embankmentalong the sluggish river Zuro sate a young boy with sad eyes gazing into the waters to spy greenbudding 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 cityin a fair land? I am Romnod, and born of the blood of Teloth, but am not old in the ways ofthe 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 andsay is both lovely and terrible. Thither would I go were I old enough to find the way, and thithershouldst thou go an thou wouldst sing and have men listen to thee. Let us leave the city Telothand fare together among the hills of spring. Thou shalt shew me the ways of travel and I willattend 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 thouseekest, for it is told that thou hast not known Aira since 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 welcomeus as brothers, nor ever laugh or frown at what we say.” And Iranon answered:

“Be it so, small one; if any in this stone place yearn for beauty hemust 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 anyspot 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 wouldlisten to my dreams; and I told myself that when older I would go to Sinara on the southernslope, and sing to smiling dromedary-men in the market-place. But when I went to Sinara I foundthe dromedary-men all drunken and ribald, and saw that their songs were not as mine, so I travelledin a barge down the Xari to onyx-walled Jaren. And the soldiers at Jaren laughed at me and draveme out, so that I wandered to many other cities. I have seen Stethelos that is below the greatcataract, 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 Olathoë in the land of Lomar.But though I have had listeners sometimes, they have ever been few, and I know that welcomeshall await 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 acrossthe Karthian hills, which may indeed be Aira, though I think not. Aira’s beauty is pastimagining, and none can tell of it without rapture, whilst of Oonai the camel-drivers whisperleeringly.”

At the sunset Iranon and small Romnod went forth from Teloth, and for longwandered amidst the green hills and cool forests. The way was rough and obscure, and never didthey seem nearer to Oonai the city of lutes and dancing; but in the dusk as the stars came outIranon would sing of Aira and its beauties and Romnod would listen, so that they were both happyafter a fashion. They ate plentifully of fruit and red berries, and marked not the passing oftime, but many years must have slipped away. Small Romnod was now not so small, and spoke deeplyinstead of shrilly, though Iranon was always the same, and decked his golden hair with vinesand fragrant resins found in the woods. So it came to pass one day that Romnod seemed olderthan Iranon, though he had been very small when Iranon had found him watching for green buddingbranches in Teloth beside the sluggish stone-banked Zuro.

Then one night when the moon was full the travellers came to a mountain crestand looked down upon the myriad lights of Oonai. Peasants had told them they were near, andIranon knew that this was not his native city of Aira. The lights of Oonai were not like thoseof Aira; for they were harsh and glaring, while the lights of Aira shine as softly and magicallyas shone the moonlight on the floor by the window where Iranon’s mother once rocked himto sleep with song. But Oonai was a city of lutes and dancing, so Iranon and Romnod went downthe steep slope that they might find men to whom songs and dreams would bring pleasure. Andwhen they were come into the town they found rose-wreathed revellers bound from house to houseand leaning from windows and balconies, who listened to the songs of Iranon and tossed him flowersand applauded when he was done. Then for a moment did Iranon believe he had found those whothought and felt even as he, though the town was not an hundredth as fair as Aira.

When dawn came Iranon looked about with dismay, for the domes of Oonai werenot golden in the sun, but grey and dismal. And the men of Oonai were pale with revelling anddull with wine, and unlike the radiant men of Aira. But because the people had thrown him blossomsand acclaimed his songs Iranon stayed on, and with him Romnod, who liked the revelry of thetown 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 with the vine of the mountains and remembering themarble 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 picturesto his hearers till the floor seemed to reflect old, beautiful, and half-remembered things insteadof the wine-reddened feasters who pelted him with roses. And the King bade him put away histattered purple, and clothed him in satin and cloth-of-gold, with rings of green jade and braceletsof tinted ivory, and lodged him in a gilded and tapestried chamber on a bed of sweet carvenwood with canopies and coverlets of flower-embroidered silk. Thus dwelt Iranon in Oonai, thecity of lutes and dancing.

It is not known how long Iranon tarried in Oonai, but one day the King broughtto the palace some wild whirling dancers from the Liranian desert, and dusky flute-players fromDrinen in the East, and after that the revellers threw their roses not so much at Iranon asat the dancers and the flute-players. And day by day that Romnod who had been a small boy ingranite Teloth grew coarser and redder with wine, till he dreamed less and less, and listenedwith less delight to the songs of Iranon. But though Iranon was sad he ceased not to sing, andat evening told again his dreams of Aira, the city of marble and beryl. Then one night the redand 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 overthe grave of Romnod and strown it with green budding 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 dancingclad only in the ragged purple in which he had come, and garlanded with fresh vines from themountains.

Into the sunset wandered Iranon, seeking still for his native land and formen who would understand and cherish his songs and dreams. In all the cities of Cydathria andin the lands beyond the Bnazic desert gay-faced children laughed at his olden songs and tatteredrobe of purple; but Iranon stayed ever young, and wore wreaths upon his golden head whilst hesang of Aira, delight of the past and hope of the future.

So came he one night to the squalid cot of an antique shepherd, bent and dirty,who kept lean flocks on a stony slope above a quicksand marsh. To this man Iranon spoke, asto 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 verdant valleys andhills forested with yath trees?” And the shepherd, hearing, looked long and strangelyat Iranon, as if recalling something very far away in time, and noted each line of the stranger’sface, and his golden hair, and his crown of vine-leaves. But he was old, and shook his headas he replied:

“O stranger, I have indeed heard the name of Aira, and the other namesthou hast spoken, but they come to me from afar down the waste of long years. I heard them inmy youth from the lips of a playmate, a beggar’s boy given to strange dreams, who wouldweave 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 whowould listen gladly to his songs and dreams. How often hath he sung to me of lands that neverwere, 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 herewe knew him from his birth. Nor was there ever a marble city of Aira, nor those who could delightin 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 onthe marsh a radiance like that which a child sees quivering on the floor as he is rocked tosleep 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 citywhere dreams are understood. That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.

Atop the tallest of earth’s peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer no man to tell thathe hath looked upon them. Lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever the men from the plainswould scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the gods to higher and higher mountains tillnow only the last remains. When they left their older peaks they took with them all signs ofthemselves; save once, it is said, when they left a carven image on the face of the mountainwhich they called Ngranek.

But now they have betaken themselves to unknown Kadath in the cold waste whereno 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 mento 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 nightthe peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on rememberedslopes. Men have felt the tears of the gods on white-capped Thurai, though they have thoughtit rain; and have heard the sighs of the gods in the plaintive dawn-winds of Lerion. In cloud-shipsthe gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain highpeaks 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 tobehold the gods of earth; a man deeply learned in the seven cryptical books of Hsan, and familiarwith the Pnakotic Manuscripts of distant and frozen Lomar. His name was Barzai the Wise, andthe 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 wiselyadvised the burgesses of Ulthar when they passed their remarkable law against the slaying ofcats, and who first told the young priest Atal where it is that black cats go at midnight onSt. John’s Eve. Barzai was learned in the lore of earth’s gods, and had gained adesire to look upon their faces. He believed that his great secret knowledge of gods could shieldhim from their wrath, so resolved to go up to the summit of high and rocky Hatheg-Kla on a nightwhen 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 itin the old days. Often the gods of earth visit Hatheg-Kla in their ships of cloud, casting palevapours over the slopes as they dance reminiscently on the summit under a clear moon. The villagersof Hatheg say it is ill to climb Hatheg-Kla at any time, and deadly to climb it by night whenpale vapours hide the summit and the moon; but Barzai heeded them not when he came from neighbouringUlthar 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 ancientcastle, so he had no common superstition in his blood, and only laughed at the fearful cotters.

Barzai and Atal went out of Hatheg into the stony desert despite the prayersof peasants, and talked of earth’s gods by their campfires at night. Many days they travelled,and from afar saw lofty Hatheg-Kla with his aureole of mournful mist. On the thirteenth daythey reached the mountain’s lonely base, and Atal spoke of his fears. But Barzai was oldand learned and had no fears, so led the way boldly up the slope that no man had scaled sincethe time of Sansu, who is written of with fright in the mouldy 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 ploddedupward with staves and axes. Finally the air grew thin, and the sky changed colour, and theclimbers found it hard to breathe; but still they toiled up and up, marvelling at the strangenessof the scene and thrilling at the thought of what would happen on the summit when the moon wasout and the pale vapours spread around. For three days they climbed higher, higher, and highertoward 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 thinmournful mists around the silent pinnacle. Then on the fifth night, which was the night ofthe full moon, Barzai saw some dense clouds far to the north, and stayed up with Atal to watchthem draw near. Thick and majestic they sailed, slowly and deliberately onward; ranging themselvesround the peak high above the watchers, and hiding the moon and the summit from view. For along hour the watchers gazed, whilst the vapours swirled and the screen of clouds grew thickerand more restless. Barzai was wise in the lore of earth’s gods, and listened hard forcertain sounds, but Atal felt the chill of the vapours and the awe of the night, and fearedmuch. And when Barzai began to climb higher and beckon eagerly, it was long before Atal wouldfollow.

So thick were the vapours that the way was hard, and though Atal followed onat last, he could scarce see the grey shape of Barzai on the dim slope above in the cloudedmoonlight. Barzai forged very far ahead, and seemed despite his age to climb more easily thanAtal; fearing not the steepness that began to grow too great for any save a strong and dauntlessman, nor pausing at wide black chasms that Atal scarce could leap. And so they went up wildlyover rocks and gulfs, slipping and stumbling, and sometimes awed at the vastness and horriblesilence of bleak ice pinnacles and mute granite steeps.

Very suddenly Barzai went out of Atal’s sight, scaling a hideous cliffthat seemed to bulge outward and block the path for any climber not inspired of earth’sgods. Atal was far below, and planning what he should do when he reached the place, when curiouslyhe noticed that the light had grown strong, as if the cloudless peak and moonlit meeting-placeof the gods were very near. And as he scrambled on toward the bulging cliff and litten sky hefelt fears more shocking than any he had known before. Then through the high mists he heardthe voice of unseen Barzai shouting wildly in delight:

“I have heard the gods! I have heard earth’s gods singing in revelryon Hatheg-Kla! The voices of earth’s gods are known to Barzai the Prophet! The mists arethin and the moon is bright, and I shall see the gods dancing wildly on Hatheg-Kla that theyloved in youth! The wisdom of Barzai hath made him greater than earth’s gods, and againsthis 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 men!”

Atal could not hear the voices Barzai heard, but he was now close to the bulgingcliff and scanning it for foot-holds. Then he heard Barzai’s voice grow shriller and louder:

“The mists are very thin, and the moon casts shadows on the slope; thevoices 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’sgods 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 theair, as if the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws; for though the way was steeper thanever, the upward path was now grown fearsomely easy, and the bulging cliff proved scarce anobstacle when he reached it and slid perilously up its convex face. The light of the moon hadstrangely failed, and as Atal plunged upward through the mists he heard Barzai the Wise shriekingin the shadows:

“The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror inthe sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth’sgods. . . . There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightenedgods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavenswhither I am plunging. . . . Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I beholdthe gods of earth!”

And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the darka loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the Phlegethonof unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish of a haunted lifetimepacked into one atrocious moment:

“The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outerhells 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 fallinginto the sky!”

And as Atal shut his eyes and stopped his ears and tried to jump downward againstthe frightful pull from unknown heights, there resounded on Hatheg-Kla that terrible peal ofthunder which awaked the good cotters of the plains and the honest burgesses of Hatheg and Nirand Ulthar, and caused them to behold through the clouds that strange eclipse of the moon thatno book ever predicted. And when the moon came out at last Atal was safe on the lower snowsof the mountain without sight of earth’s gods, or of the other gods.

Now it is told in the mouldy Pnakotic Manuscripts that Sansu found naught butwordless ice and rock when he climbed Hatheg-Kla in the youth of the world. Yet when the menof Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg crushed their fears and scaled that haunted steep by day in searchof Barzai the Wise, they found graven in the naked stone of the summit a curious and Cyclopeansymbol fifty cubits wide, as if the rock had been riven by some titanic chisel. And the symbolwas like to one that learned men have discerned in those frightful parts of the Pnakotic Manuscriptswhich are too ancient to be read. This they found.

Barzai the Wise they never found, nor could the holy priest Atal ever be persuadedto pray for his soul’s repose. Moreover, to this day the people of Ulthar and Nir andHatheg fear eclipses, and pray by night when pale vapours hide the mountain-top and the moon.And above the mists on Hatheg-Kla earth’s gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for theyknow they are safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of cloud and play in the oldenway, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the climbing of inaccessible places.

Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connexionwith anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more appallinguniverse of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, andwhose existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep—those rare dreams beyond dreamswhich come never to common men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. Thecosmos of our waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipeof a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when sucked backby the jester’s whim. Men of learning suspect it little, and ignore it mostly. Wise menhave interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has said thatall time and space are relative, and men have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyeshas done no more than suspect. I had wished and tried to do more than suspect, and my friendhad tried and partly succeeded. Then we both tried together, and with exotic drugs courted terribleand 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 wantof symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveriespartook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression whichthe nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet withinthem lay unbelievable elements of time and space—things which at bottom possess no distinctand definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general character of our experiencesby calling them plungings or soarings; for in every period of revelation somepart of our minds broke boldly away from all that is real and present, rushing aëriallyalong shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted abysses, and occasionally tearing throughcertain well-marked and typical obstacles describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds or vapours.In these black and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimes together. When wewere together, my friend was always far ahead; I could comprehend his presence despite the absenceof form by a species of pictorial memory whereby his face appeared to me, golden from a strangelight 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 merestillusion. I know only that there must have been something very singular involved, since we cameat length to marvel why we did not grow old. Our discourse was unholy, and always hideouslyambitious—no god or daemon could have aspired to discoveries and conquests like thosewhich we planned in whispers. I shiver as I speak of them, and dare not be explicit; thoughI 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 nightsky. I will hint—only hint—that he had designs which involved the rulership of thevisible 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 sharein these extreme aspirations. Anything my friend may have said or written to the contrary mustbe erroneous, for I am no man of strength to risk the unmentionable warfare in unmentionablespheres by which alone one might achieve success.

There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly intolimitless vacua beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissiblesort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yetwhich are now partly lost to my memory and partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscousobstacles were clawed through in rapid succession, and at length I felt that we had been borneto realms of greater remoteness than any we had previously known. My friend was vastly in advanceas we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin aether, and I could see the sinister exultationon his floating, luminous, too youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quicklydisappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I couldnot penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky, clammy mass, if suchterms 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 successfullypassed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream and opened my physical eyes tothe tower studio in whose opposite corner reclined the pallid and still unconscious form ofmy fellow-dreamer, weirdly haggard and wildly beautiful as the moon shed gold-green light onhis marble features. Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may pityingheaven keep from my sight and sound another thing like that which took place before me. I cannottell you how he shrieked, or what vistas of unvisitable hells gleamed for a second in blackeyes crazed with fright. I can only say that I fainted, and did not stir till he himself recoveredand shook me in his phrensy 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 neverventure within those realms again. What he had seen, he dared not tell me; but he said fromhis wisdom that we must sleep as little as possible, even if drugs were necessary to keep usawake. That he was right, I soon learned from the unutterable fear which engulfed me wheneverconsciousness lapsed. After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friendaged with a rapidity almost shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form and hair whiten almostbefore one’s eyes. Our mode of life was now totally altered. Heretofore a recluse so faras I know—his true name and origin never having passed his lips—my friend now becamefrantic in his fear of solitude. At night he would not be alone, nor would the company of afew persons calm him. His sole relief was obtained in revelry of the most general and boisteroussort; so that few assemblies of the young and the gay were unknown to us. Our appearance andage seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly resented, but which my friend considereda lesser evil than solitude. Especially was he afraid to be out of doors alone when the starswere shining, and if forced to this condition he would often glance furtively at the sky asif hunted by some monstrous thing therein. He did not always glance at the same place in thesky—it seemed to be a different place at different times. On spring evenings it wouldbe low in the northeast. In the summer it would be nearly overhead. In the autumn it would bein 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 fearwith anything in particular; but then I began to see that he must be looking at a special spoton the celestial vault whose position at different times corresponded to the direction of hisglance—a spot roughly marked by the constellation Corona Borealis.

We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the dayswhen we had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were aged and weak from ourdrugs, dissipations, and nervous overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard of my friend hadbecome snow-white. Our freedom from long sleep was surprising, for seldom did we succumb morethan an hour or two at a time to the shadow which had now grown so frightful a menace. Thencame one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were hard to buy. My statuesand ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase new materials, or energy to fashionthem even had I possessed them. We suffered terribly, and on a certain night my friend sankinto a deep-breathing sleep from which I could not awaken him. I can recall the scene now—thedesolate, pitch-black garret studio under the eaves with the rain beating down; the tickingof the 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 noisesmuffled by fog and space; and worst of all the deep, steady, sinister breathing of my friendon the couch—a rhythmical breathing which seemed to measure moments of supernal fear andagony 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 impressionsand associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I heard a clock strike somewhere—notours, for that was not a striking clock—and my morbid fancy found in this a new starting-pointfor idle wanderings. Clocks—time—space—infinity—and then my fancy revertedto the local as I reflected that even now, beyond the roof and the fog and the rain and theatmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona Borealis, which my friend hadappeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of stars must even now be glowing unseenthrough the measureless abysses of aether. All at once my feverishly sensitive ears seemed todetect a new and wholly distinct component in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds—alow and damnably insistent whine from very far away; droning, clamouring, mocking, calling,from the northeast.

But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set uponmy soul such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not that which drew the shrieksand excited the convulsions which caused lodgers and police to break down the door. It was notwhat I heard, but what I saw; for in that dark, locked, shuttered, and curtainedroom there appeared from the black northeast corner a shaft of horrible red-gold light—ashaft which bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon therecumbent head of the troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the luminous andstrangely 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 cavernsof nightmare.

And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deep-sunkeneyes open in terror, and the thin, shadowed lips part as if for a scream too frightful to beuttered. There dwelt in that ghastly and flexible face, as it shone bodiless, luminous, andrejuvenated in the blackness, more of stark, teeming, brain-shattering fear than all the restof heaven and earth has ever revealed to me. No word was spoken amidst the distant sound thatgrew nearer and nearer, but as I followed the memory-face’s mad stare along that cursedshaft of light to its source, the source whence also the whining came, I too saw for an instantwhat it saw, and fell with ringing ears in that fit of shrieking and epilepsy which broughtthe lodgers and the police. Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that Isaw; nor could the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it willnever speak again. But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord ofsleep, 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 thestrange and hideous thing, but others were tainted with a forgetfulness which can mean nothingif not madness. They have said, I know not for what reason, that I never had a friend, but thatart, philosophy, and insanity had filled all my tragic life. The lodgers and police on thatnight soothed me, and the doctor administered something to quiet me, nor did anyone see whata nightmare event had taken place. My stricken friend moved them to no pity, but what they foundon the couch in the studio made them give me a praise which sickened me, and now a fame whichI spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald, grey-bearded, shrivelled, 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 atthe thing which the shining shaft of light left cold, petrified, and unvocal. It is all thatremains of my friend; the friend who led me on to madness and wreckage; a godlike head of suchmarble as only old Hellas could yield, young with the youth that is outside time, and with beauteousbearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks waving and poppy-crowned.They say that that haunting memory-face is modelled from my own, as it was at twenty-five, butupon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of Attica— ’ΥΠΝΟΣ.

In the morning mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs beyond Kingsport. White and featheryit comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and cavesof leviathan. And later, in still summer rains on the steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatterbits of those dreams, that men shall not live without rumour of old, strange secrets, and wondersthat planets tell planets alone in the night. When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons,and conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eagermists flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on the rocks see only a mystic whiteness,as if the cliff’s rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolledfree in the aether of faery.

Now north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace onterrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a grey frozen wind-cloud. Alone it is,a bleak point jutting in limitless space, for there the coast turns sharp where the great Miskatonicpours out of the plains past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint memories ofNew England’s hills. The sea-folk in Kingsport look up at that cliff as other sea-folklook up at the pole-star, and time the night’s watches by the way it hides or shews theGreat 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 theyterm The Causeway; but this one they fear because it is so near the sky. The Portuguese sailorscoming in from a voyage cross themselves when they first see it, and the old Yankees believeit would be a much graver matter than death to climb it, if indeed that were possible. Neverthelessthere 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 thereinwho talks with the morning mists that come up from the deep, and perhaps sees singular thingsoceanward at those times when the cliff’s rim becomes the rim of all earth, and solemnbuoys toll free in the white aether of faery. This they tell from hearsay, for that forbiddingcrag is always unvisited, and natives dislike to train telescopes on it. Summer boarders haveindeed scanned it with jaunty binoculars, but have never seen more than the grey primeval roof,peaked and shingled, whose eaves come nearly to the grey foundations, and the dim yellow lightof the little windows peeping out from under those eaves in the dusk. These summer people donot believe that the same One has lived in the ancient house for hundreds of years, but cannotprove their heresy to any real Kingsporter. Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulumsin bottles, buys groceries with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard ofhis antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the same when his grandfatherwas a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago, when Belcher or Shirley or Pownallor Bernard was Governor of His Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.

Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name was ThomasOlney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay. With stout wife andromping 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 FatherNeptune, 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 thecryptical aether beyond, listening to spectral bells and the wild cries of what might have beengulls. 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 anddown hill, and study the crazy tottering gables and odd pillared doorways which had shelteredso many generations of sturdy sea-folk. And he even talked with the Terrible Old Man, who wasnot fond of strangers, and was invited into his fearsomely archaic cottage where low ceilingsand wormy panelling hear the echoes of disquieting soliloquies in the dark small hours.

Of course it was inevitable that Olney should mark the grey unvisited cottagein the sky, on that sinister northward crag which is one with the mists and the firmament. Alwaysover Kingsport it hung, and always its mystery sounded in whispers through Kingsport’scrooked alleys. The Terrible Old Man wheezed a tale that his father had told him, of lightningthat shot one night up from that peaked cottage to the clouds of higher heaven; and GrannyOrne, whose tiny gambrel-roofed abode in Ship Street is all covered with moss and ivy, croakedover something her grandmother had heard at second-hand, about shapes that flapped out of theeastern mists straight into the narrow single door of that unreachable place—for the dooris 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’sfear nor the summer boarder’s usual indolence, Olney made a very terrible resolve. Despitea conservative training—or because of it, for humdrum lives breed wistful longings ofthe unknown—he swore a great oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and visit the abnormallyantique grey cottage in the sky. Very plausibly his saner self argued that the place must betenanted by people who reached it from inland along the easier ridge beside the Miskatonic’sestuary. 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 alongthe 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 southernslope. East and north it rose thousands of feet vertically from the water, so only the westernside, inland and toward Arkham, remained.

One early morning in August Olney set out to find a path to the inaccessiblepinnacle. He worked northwest along pleasant back roads, past Hooper’s Pond and the oldbrick powder-house to where the pastures slope up to the ridge above the Miskatonic and givea 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 signof man’s presence; not even a stone wall or a straying cow, but only the tall grass andgiant trees and tangles of briers that the first Indian might have seen. As he climbed slowlyeast, higher and higher above the estuary on his left and nearer and nearer the sea, he foundthe way growing in difficulty; till he wondered how ever the dwellers in that disliked placemanaged 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 andantique roofs and spires of Kingsport. Even Central Hill was a dwarf from this height, and hecould just make out the ancient graveyard by the Congregational Hospital, beneath which rumoursaid 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 grey cottage. Nowthe ridge narrowed, and Olney grew dizzy at his loneness in the sky. South of him the frightfulprecipice above Kingsport, north of him the vertical drop of nearly a mile to the river’smouth. Suddenly a great chasm opened before him, ten feet deep, so that he had to let himselfdown by his hands and drop to a slanting floor, and then crawl perilously up a natural defilein the opposite wall. So this was the way the folk of the uncanny house journeyed betwixt earthand sky!

When he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he clearlysaw the lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as grey as the rock, and high peak standingbold against the milky white of the seaward vapours. And he perceived that there was no dooron this landward end, but only a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull’s-eyepanes leaded in seventeenth-century fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos, and he couldsee nothing below but the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone in the sky with thisqueer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled around to the front and saw that the wallstood flush with the cliff’s edge, so that the single narrow door was not to be reachedsave 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 forma standing chimney.

As the mist thickened, Olney crept around to the windows on the north and westand 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 bolt shoot, and a long creaking follow as if a heavy door were slowlyand cautiously opened. This was on the oceanward side that he could not see, where the narrowportal 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 thewindows opening, first on the north side opposite him, and then on the west just around thecorner. 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 houseon one side and the vacancy of upper air on the other. When a fumbling came in the nearer casem*ntshe crept around to the west again, flattening himself against the wall beside the now openedwindows. It was plain that the owner had come home; but he had not come from the land, nor fromany balloon or airship that could be imagined. Steps sounded again, and Olney edged round tothe north; but before he could find a haven a voice called softly, and he knew he must confronthis host.

Stuck out of a west window was a great black-bearded face whose eyes shonephosphorescently with the imprint of unheard-of sights. But the voice was gentle, and of a quaintolden kind, so that Olney did not shudder when a brown hand reached out to help him over thesill and into that low room of black oak wainscots and carved Tudor furnishings. The man wasclad in very ancient garments, and had about him an unplaceable nimbus of sea-lore and dreamsof tall galleons. Olney does not recall many of the wonders he told, or even who he was; butsays that he was strange and kindly, and filled with the magic of unfathomed voids of time andspace. The small room seemed green with a dim aqueous light, and Olney saw that the far windowsto the east were not open, but shut against the misty aether with dull thick panes like thebottoms of old bottles.

That bearded host seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the eldermysteries; and from the tales of marvellous ancient things he related, it must be guessed thatthe village folk were right in saying he had communed with the mists of the sea and the cloudsof 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 rumours of old times and far places, and heardhow the Kings of Atlantis fought with the slippery blasphemies that wriggled out of rifts inocean’s floor, and how the pillared and weedy temple of Poseidonis is still glimpsed atmidnight by lost ships, who know 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 eventhe Elder Ones were born, and when only the other gods came to dance on the peak of Hatheg-Klain the stony desert near Ulthar, beyond the river Skai.

It was at this point that there came a knocking on the door; that ancient doorof 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 avery small peep-hole. What he saw he did not like, so pressed his fingers to his lips and tiptoedaround 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 insuccession a queer black outline as the caller moved inquisitively about before leaving; andhe was glad his host had not answered the knocking. For there are strange objects in the greatabyss, 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 gesturesof prayer, and lit tall candles in curiously wrought brass candlesticks. Frequently he wouldglance at the door as if he expected someone, and at length his glance seemed answered by asingular rapping which must have followed some very ancient and secret code. This time he didnot even glance through the peep-hole, but swung the great oak bar and shot the bolt, unlatchingthe 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 fromthe deep all the dreams and memories of earth’s sunken Mighty Ones. And golden flamesplayed about weedy locks, so that Olney was dazzled as he did them homage. Trident-bearing Neptunewas there, and sportive tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins’ backs was balanceda vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the GreatAbyss. And the conches of the tritons gave weird blasts, and the nereids made strange soundsby striking on the grotesque resonant shells of unknown lurkers in black sea-caves. Then hoaryNodens reached forth a wizened hand and helped Olney and his host into the vast shell, whereatthe conches and the gongs set up a wild and awesome clamour. And out into the limitless aetherreeled 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 themists gave them glimpses of it, and when toward the small hours the little dim windows wentdark they whispered of dread and disaster. And Olney’s children and stout wife prayedto the bland proper god of Baptists, and hoped that the traveller would borrow an umbrella andrubbers unless the rain stopped by morning. Then dawn swam dripping and mist-wreathed out ofthe sea, and the buoys tolled solemn in vortices of white aether. And at noon elfin horns rangover the ocean as Olney, dry and light-footed, climbed down from the cliffs to antique Kingsportwith the look of far places in his eyes. He could not recall what he had dreamed in the sky-perchedhut of that still nameless hermit, or say how he had crept down that crag untraversed by otherfeet. Nor could he talk of these matters at all save with the Terrible Old Man, who afterwardmumbled queer things in his long white beard; vowing that the man who came down from that cragwas not wholly the man who went up, and that somewhere under that grey peaked roof, or amidstinconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still the lost spirit of himwho was Thomas Olney.

And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and weariness,the philosopher has laboured and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds ofa citizen. Not any more does he long for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets thatpeer 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 stouterand his children older and prosier and more useful, and he never fails to smile correctly withpride when the occasion calls for it. In his glance there is not any restless light, and ifhe ever listens for solemn bells or far elfin horns it is only at night when old dreams arewandering. 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 BristolHighlands, where no tall crags tower, and the neighbours are urban and modern.

But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man admitsa thing untold by his grandfather. For now, when the wind sweeps boisterous out of the northpast the high ancient house that is one with the firmament, there is broken at last that ominousbrooding silence ever before the bane of Kingsport’s maritime cotters. And old folk tellof pleasing voices heard singing there, and of laughter that swells with joys beyond earth’sjoys; 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 offrozen 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 muffledseaward ringing is that of the solemn buoys.

Worst of all, though, is the shrivelling of old fears in the hearts of Kingsport’syoung 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 gladnessbeats, and with them the tinkle of laughter and music. What tales the sea-mists may bring tothat haunted and northernmost pinnacle they do not know, but they long to extract some hintof the wonders that knock at the cliff-yawning door when clouds are thickest. And patriarchsdread lest some day one by one they seek out that inaccessible peak in the sky, and learn whatcenturied secrets hide beneath the steep shingled roof which is part of the rocks and the starsand the ancient fears of Kingsport. That those venturesome youths will come back they do notdoubt, but they think a light may be gone from their eyes, and a will from their hearts. Andthey do not wish quaint Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic gables to drag listlessdown the years while voice by voice the laughing chorus grows stronger and wilder in that unknownand terrible eyrie where mists and the dreams of mists stop to rest on their way from the seato the skies.

They do not wish the souls of their young men to leave the pleasant hearthsand gambrel-roofed taverns of old Kingsport, nor do they wish the laughter and song in thathigh rocky place to grow louder. For as the voice which has come has brought fresh mists fromthe sea and from the north fresh lights, so do they say that still other voices will bring moremists and more lights, till perhaps the olden gods (whose existence they hint only in whispersfor fear the Congregational parson shall hear) may come out of the deep and from unknown Kadathin the cold waste and make their dwelling on that evilly appropriate crag so close to the gentlehills and valleys of quiet simple fisherfolk. This they do not wish, for to plain people thingsnot of earth are unwelcome; and besides, the Terrible Old Man often recalls what Olney saidabout a knock that the lone dweller feared, and a shape seen black and inquisitive against themist through those queer translucent windows of leaded bull’s-eyes.

All these things, however, the Elder Ones only may decide; and meanwhile themorning mist still comes up by that lonely vertiginous peak with the steep ancient house, thatgrey low-eaved house where none is seen but where evening brings furtive lights while the northwind tells of strange revels. White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers theclouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And when tales fly thick inthe grottoes of tritons, and conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the ElderOnes, then great eager vapours flock to heaven laden with lore; and Kingsport, nestling uneasyon its lesser cliffs below that awesome hanging sentinel of rock, sees oceanward only a mysticwhiteness, as if the cliff’s rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of thebuoys tolled free in the aether of faery.

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time hehad made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyondspace, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardenedupon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut offaltogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran,or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces withveined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.

He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaningphilosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processeswhich shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all lifeis only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those bornof 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 physicallyexists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simplefancies were inane and childish, and he believed it because he could see that they might easilybe so. What he failed to recall was that the deeds of reality are just as inane and childish,and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purposeas the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back tonothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flickerfor a second now and then in the darkness.

They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workingsof those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escapeinto twilight realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associationsof his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him insteadtoward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him find wonder in the atom’s vortexand mystery in the sky’s dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in thingswhose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature becausehe preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creation.

So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common eventsand 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 ploughmanin real life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gatesand domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from his dreams; and under their guidancehe cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and tragedy.

Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, andmeaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with thosepompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they hadtaught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that thedaily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy ofrespect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reasonand purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see that even humour isempty 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 faithendeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues whichseemed 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 whichreigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full theawkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guessesof a primal race confronting the unknown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people triedto 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 creedshad they been content to offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in their true guiseof ethereal fantasy.

But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he foundthem even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, andthat loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony withthe dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres outof the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamentalfruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathersthink and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture. Instead, theyeither denied these things altogether or transferred them to the crude, vague instincts whichthey shared with the beasts and peasants; so that their lives were dragged malodorously outin pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped fromsomething no more unsound than that which still held them. They had traded the false gods offear and blind piety for those of licence and anarchy.

Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness andsqualor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone, while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logicwith which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idolsthey had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, couldnot 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, evenwhen all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of theirscientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom,and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old ways with the old beliefs; nor everstopped to think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughtsand judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aimsor stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew voidof direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustleand pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. Whenthese things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated ironyand bitterness, and found fault with the social order. Never could they realise that their brutefoundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfactionof one moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solacethe world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhoodand innocence.

Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as befitteda man of keen thought and good heritage. With his dreams fading under the ridicule of the agehe could not believe in anything, but the love of harmony kept him close to the ways of hisrace and station. He walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no vistaseemed fully real; because every flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse ofbalustraded plazas in the first lamps of evening served only to remind him of dreams he hadonce known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find. Travelwas only a mockery; and even the Great War stirred him but little, though he served from thefirst in the Foreign Legion of France. For a while he sought friends, but soon grew weary ofthe crudeness of their emotions, and the sameness and earthiness of their visions. He felt vaguelyglad that all his relatives were distant and out of touch with him, for they could not haveunderstood 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 dreamsfirst failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or fulfilment; for the touch of earthwas upon his mind, and he could not think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humourdragged down all the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of improbability blastedall the delicate and amazing flowers in his faery gardens. The convention of assumed pity spiltmawkishness on his characters, while the myth of an important reality and significant humanevents and emotions debased all his high fantasy into thin-veiled allegory and cheap socialsatire. His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because he knew howempty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writing. They werevery graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but hesaw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away.

It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in thenotions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of these,however, soon shewed their poverty and barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines ofoccultism are as dry and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender palliativeof truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity, falsehood, and muddled thinking are not dream; andform no escape from life to a mind trained above their level. So Carter bought stranger booksand sought out deeper and more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into arcana of consciousnessthat few have trod, and learning things about the secret pits of life, legend, and immemorialantiquity which disturbed him ever afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane, and furnishedhis 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 sensationsof light, heat, sound, taste, and odour.

Once he heard of a man in the South who was shunned and feared for the blasphemousthings he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets smuggled from India and Arabia. Him hevisited, living with him and sharing his studies for seven years, till horror overtook themone 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, whichmade him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor. But these horrorstook him only to the edge of reality, and were not of the true dream country he had known inyouth; so that at fifty he despaired of any rest or contentment in a world grown too busy forbeauty and too shrewd for dream.

Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things, Carterspent 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 Americanacquaintance a very curious liquid to take him to oblivion without suffering. Inertia and forceof habit, however, caused him to defer action; and he lingered indecisively among thoughts ofold times, taking down the strange hangings from his walls and refitting the house as it wasin his early boyhood—purple panes, Victorian furniture, and all.

With the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for his relicsof youth and his cleavage from the world made life and sophistication seem very distant andunreal; 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 thecommonest slumbers know, but now there returned a flicker of something stranger and wilder;something of vaguely awesome immanence which took the form of tensely clear pictures from hischildhood days, and made him think of little inconsequential things he had long forgotten. Hewould often awake calling for his mother and grandfather, both in their graves a quarter ofa century.

Then one night his grandfather reminded him of a key. The grey old scholar,as vivid as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their ancient line, and of the strange visionsof the delicate and sensitive men who composed it. He spoke of the flame-eyed Crusader who learntwild secrets of the Saracens that held him captive; and of the first Sir Randolph Carter whostudied magic when Elizabeth was queen. He spoke, too, of that Edmund Carter who had just escapedhanging in the Salem witchcraft, and who had placed in an antique box a great silver key handeddown from his ancestors. Before Carter awaked, the gentle visitant had told him where to findthat box; that carved oak box of archaic wonder whose grotesque lid no hand had raised for twocenturies.

In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and forgottenat the back of a drawer in a tall chest. It was about a foot square, and its Gothic carvingswere so fearful that he did not marvel no person since Edmund Carter had dared to open it. Itgave forth no noise when shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices. Thatit held a key was indeed only a dim legend, and Randolph Carter’s father had never knownsuch a box existed. It was bound in rusty iron, and no means was provided for working the formidablelock. 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 facesleering from the blackened wood, and at some unplaced familiarity. Inside, wrapped in a discolouredparchment, was a huge key of tarnished silver covered with cryptical arabesques; but of anylegible explanation there was none. The parchment was voluminous, and held only the strangehieroglyphs of an unknown tongue written with an antique reed. Carter recognised the charactersas those he had seen on a certain papyrus scroll belonging to that terrible scholar of the Southwho had vanished one midnight in a nameless cemetery. The man had always shivered when he readthis scroll, and Carter shivered now.

But he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box of ancientoak. His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and though shewing him none of the strangecities and incredible gardens of the old days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose couldnot be mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and with the mingled wills of allhis fathers were pulling him toward some hidden and ancestral source. Then he knew he must gointo the past and merge himself with old things, and day after day he thought of the hills tothe north where haunted Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead ofhis people lay.

In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past gracefullines of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale and hanging woodland, curving roadand nestling farmstead, and the crystal windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here and there byrustic bridges of wood or stone. At one bend he saw the group of giant elms among which an ancestorhad oddly vanished a century and a half before, and shuddered as the wind blew meaningly throughthem. Then there was the crumbling farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its littleevil windows and great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north side. He speeded up hiscar as he passed it, and did not slacken till he had mounted the hill where his mother and herfathers before her were born, and where the old white house still looked proudly across theroad at the breathlessly lovely panorama of rocky slope and verdant valley, with the distantspires of Kingsport on the horizon, and hints of the archaic, dream-laden sea in the farthestbackground.

Then came the steeper slope that held the old Carter place he had not seenin over forty years. Afternoon was far gone when he reached the foot, and at the bend half wayup he paused to scan the outspread countryside golden and glorified in the slanting floods ofmagic poured out by a western sun. All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent dreams seemedpresent in this hushed and unearthly landscape, and he thought of the unknown solitudes of otherplanets as his eyes traced out the velvet and deserted lawns shining undulant between theirtumbled walls, the 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 waterscrooned 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 walkedon up the hill. Woods now engulfed him utterly, though he knew the house was on a high knollthat cleared the trees except to the north. He wondered how it would look, for it had been leftvacant and untended through his neglect since the death of his strange great-uncle Christopherthirty years before. In his boyhood he had revelled through long visits there, and had foundweird marvels in the woods beyond the orchard.

Shadows thickened around him, for the night was near. Once a gap in the treesopened up to the right, so that he saw off across leagues of twilight meadow and spied the oldCongregational steeple on Central Hill in Kingsport; pink with the last flush of day, the panesof 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 theold white church had long been torn down to make room for the Congregational Hospital. He hadread of it with interest, for the paper had told about some strange burrows or passages foundin the rocky hill beneath.

Through his puzzlement a voice piped, and he started again at its familiarityafter long years. Old Benijah Corey had been his Uncle Christopher’s hired man, and wasaged 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 tonewas haunting and unmistakable. To think that “Old Benijy” should still be alive!

“Mister Randy! Mister Randy! Whar be ye? D’ye want to skeer yerAunt Marthy plumb to death? Hain’t she tuld ye to keep nigh the place in the arternoonan’ git back afur dark? Randy! Ran . . . dee! . . . He’sthe 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 timber-lot! . . . Hey, yew, Ran . . .dee!”

Randolph Carter stopped in the pitch darkness and rubbed his hand across hiseyes. Something was queer. He had been somewhere he ought not to be; had strayed very far awayto places where he had not belonged, and was now inexcusably late. He had not noticed the timeon 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 hadhis little telescope with him, and put his hand in his blouse pocket to see. No, it was notthere, but there was the big silver key he had found in a box somewhere. Uncle Chris had toldhim something odd once about an old unopened box with a key in it, but Aunt Martha had stoppedthe story abruptly, saying it was no kind of thing to tell a child whose head was already toofull of queer fancies. He tried to recall just where he had found the key, but something seemedvery confused. He guessed it was in the attic at home in Boston, and dimly remembered bribingParks 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 oflong years had fallen upon the brisk little co*ckney.

“Ran . . . dee! Ran . . . dee! Hi! Hi! Randy!”

A swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah pounced on thesilent 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 heerdme 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 thesehere woods ain’t no fitten place to be traipsin’ this hour! They’s thingsabroad what dun’t do nobody no good, as my gran’sir’ knowed afur me. Come,Mister Randy, or Hannah wun’t keep supper no longer!”

So Randolph Carter was marched up the road where wondering stars glimmeredthrough high autumn boughs. And dogs barked as the yellow light of small-paned windows shoneout at the farther turn, and the Pleiades twinkled across the open knoll where a great gambrelroof stood black against the dim west. Aunt Martha was in the doorway, and did not scold toohard when Benijah shoved the truant in. She knew Uncle Chris well enough to expect such thingsof the Carter blood. Randolph did not shew his key, but ate his supper in silence and protestedonly 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 timber-lotif Uncle Chris had not caught him and forced him into his chair by the breakfast table. He lookedimpatiently 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. Thetrees and the hills were close to him, and formed the gates of that timeless realm which washis true country.

Then, when he was free, he felt in his blouse pocket for the key; and beingreassured, skipped off across the orchard to the rise beyond, where the wooded hill climbedagain 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 amongthe swollen and twisted trunks of a sacred grove. Once in his ascent Randolph crossed a rushingstream whose falls a little way off sang runic incantations to the lurking fauns and aegipansand 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 wasdeep; far deeper than anyone but Randolph suspected, for the boy had found a fissure in thefarthermost black corner that led to a loftier grotto beyond—a haunting sepulchral placewhose granite walls held a curious illusion of conscious artifice. On this occasion he crawledin as usual, lighting his way with matches filched from the sitting-room match-safe, and edgingthrough the final crevice with an eagerness hard to explain even to himself. He could not tellwhy he approached the farther wall so confidently, or why he instinctively drew forth the greatsilver key as he did so. But on he went, and when he danced back to the house that night heoffered no excuses for his lateness, nor heeded in the least the reproofs he gained for ignoringthe noontide dinner-horn altogether.

Now it is agreed by all the distant relatives of Randolph Carter that something occurred toheighten 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 strangerstill were some of the qualities which he shewed 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, thoughat the time without meaning, were later found to justify the singular impressions. In subsequentdecades 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 carelessword of undoubted connexion with what was then far in the future. He did not himself understandthese words, or know why certain things made him feel certain emotions; but fancied that someunremembered dream must be responsible. It was as early as 1897 that he turned pale when sometraveller mentioned the French town of Belloy-en-Santerre, and friends remembered it when hewas almost mortally wounded there in 1916, while serving with the Foreign Legion in the GreatWar.

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 onthe morning he drove off alone in his car with a key he had recently found. Parks had helpedhim get the key from the old box containing it, and had felt strangely affected by the grotesquecarvings on the box, and by some other odd quality he could not name. When Carter left, he hadsaid 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 withcarvings that frightened the countrymen who stumbled on it. The box held only a queer parchmentwhose characters no linguist or palaeographer has been able to decipher or identify. Rain hadlong effaced any possible footprints, though Boston investigators had something to say aboutevidences 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 handkerchieffound among forest rocks on the hillside beyond cannot be identified as belonging to the missingman.

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 aretwists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from whatI know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not hewill ever come back, I cannot say. He wanted the lands of dream he had lost, and yearned forthe days of his childhood. Then he found a key, and I somehow believe he was able to use itto strange advantage.

I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a certaindream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond the river Skai, that a newking reigns on the opal throne in Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffsof glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singularlabyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this rumour. Certainly, I look forward impatientlyto the sight of that great silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolisedall the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatchedaway while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed inthe sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basinedfountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marchingbetween delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steepnorthward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes ofgrassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortalcymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carterstood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancyand suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to placeagain what once had an awesome and momentous place.

He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in whatcycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could not tell. Vaguelyit called up glimpses of a far, forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure lay in all themystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode forth prophetick to the eager sound of lutesand song; unclosing faery gates toward further and surprising marvels. But each night as hestood on that high marble terrace with the curious urns and carven rail and looked off overthat hushed sunset city of beauty and unearthly immanence, he felt the bondage of dream’styrannous gods; for in no wise could he leave that lofty spot, or descend the wide marmorealflights flung endlessly down to where those streets of elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.

When for the third time he awaked with those flights still undescended andthose hushed sunset streets still untraversed, he prayed long and earnestly to the hidden godsof dream that brood capricious above the clouds on unknown Kadath, in the cold waste where noman treads. But the gods made no answer and shewed no relenting, nor did they give any favouringsign when he prayed to them in dream, and invoked them sacrificially through the bearded priestsNasht and Kaman-Thah, whose cavern-temple with its pillar of flame lies not far from the gatesof the waking world. It seemed, however, that his prayers must have been adversely heard, forafter even the first of them he ceased wholly to behold the marvellous city; as if his threeglimpses from afar had been mere accidents or oversights, and against some hidden plan or wishof the gods.

At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and crypticalhill 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 desertsthrough 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 andtalked of this design to the bearded priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah. And the priests shook theirpshent-bearing heads and vowed it would be the death of his soul. They pointed out that theGreat Ones had shewn already their wish, and that it is not agreeable to them to be harassedby insistent pleas. They reminded him, too, that not only had no man ever been to unknown Kadath,but no man had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlandsaround our world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or Aldebaran.If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be reached; but only three fully human souls sincetime began had ever crossed and recrossed the black impious gulfs to other dreamlands, andof 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 andbubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose nameno lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyondtime amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursedflutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the giganticultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messengeris the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in thecavern 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 marvelloussunset city. He knew that his journey would be strange and long, and that the Great Ones wouldbe against it; but being old in the land of dream he counted on many useful memories and devicesto aid him. So asking a farewell 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 throughthe enchanted wood.

In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine gropingboughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretivezoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream-world and a few of the waking world, sincethe 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 dream. But over the nearer partsof the dream-world they pass freely, flitting small and brown and unseen and bearing back piquanttales to beguile the hours around their hearths in the forest they love. Most of them live inburrows, but some inhabit the trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungiit is muttered that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, forcertainly many dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. Carter, however, had nofear; for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering language and made many a treatywith them; having found through their help the splendid city of Celephaîs in Ooth-Nargaibeyond the Tanarian Hills, where reigns half the year the great King Kuranes, a man he had knownby another name in life. Kuranes was the one soul who had been to the star-gulfs and returnedfree 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 near the centre of the wood, where a circleof great mossy stones in what was once a clearing tells of older and more terrible dwellerslong 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 dancedand sacrificed. Finally the greater light of those thicker fungi revealed a sinister green andgrey vastness pushing up through the roof of the forest and out of sight. This was the nearestof the great ring of stones, and Carter knew he was close to the zoog village. Renewing hisfluttering sound, he waited patiently; and was at length rewarded by an impression of many eyeswatching him. It was the zoogs, for one sees their weird eyes long before one can discern theirsmall, slippery brown outlines.

Out they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree, till the whole dim-littenregion was alive with them. Some of the wilder ones brushed Carter unpleasantly, and one evennipped loathsomely at his ear; but these lawless spirits were soon restrained by their elders.The Council of Sages, recognising the visitor, offered a gourd of fermented sap from a hauntedtree unlike the others, which had grown from a seed dropt down by someone on the moon; and asCarter 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 ourdream-world or in another. Rumours of the Great Ones came equally from all points; and one mightonly say that they were likelier to be seen on high mountain peaks than in valleys, since onsuch 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 saidthat in Ulthar, beyond the river Skai, there still lingered the last copy of those inconceivablyold Pnakotic Manuscripts made by waking men in forgotten boreal kingdoms and borne into theland of dreams when the hairy cannibal Gnophkehs overcame many-templed Olathoë and slewall the heroes of the land of Lomar. Those manuscripts, he said, told much of the gods; andbesides, in Ulthar there were men who had seen the signs of the gods, and even one old priestwho had scaled a great mountain to behold them dancing by moonlight. He had failed, though hiscompanion had succeeded and perished namelessly.

So Randolph Carter thanked the zoogs, who fluttered amicably and gave him anothergourd of moon-tree wine to take with him, and set out through the phosphorescent wood for theother side, where the rushing Skai flows down from the slopes of Lerion, and Hatheg and Nirand 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. Thevast oaks grew thicker as he pushed on beyond the village, and he looked sharply for a certainspot where they would thin somewhat, standing quite dead or dying among the unnaturally densefungi and the rotting mould and mushy logs of their fallen brothers. There he would turn sharplyaside, for at that spot a mighty slab of stone rests on the forest floor; and those who havedared approach it say that it bears an iron ring three feet wide. Remembering the archaic circleof great mossy rocks, and what it was possibly set up for, the zoogs do not pause near thatexpansive slab with its huge ring; for they realise that all which is forgotten need not necessarilybe 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 flutteringof 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 hecame 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 everyhand were the hedges and ploughed fields and thatched roofs of a peaceful land. Once he stoppedat a farmhouse well for a cup of water, and all the dogs barked affrightedly at the inconspicuouszoogs that crept through the grass behind. At another house, where people were stirring, heasked questions about the gods, and whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer andhis 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 oncevisited and which marked his farthest former travels in this direction; and soon afterward hecame to the great stone bridge across the Skai, into whose central pier the masons had sealeda living human sacrifice when they built it thirteen-hundred years before. Once on the otherside, the frequent presence of cats (who all arched their backs at the trailing zoogs) revealedthe near neighbourhood 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 cottagesand neatly fenced farms; and still pleasanter was the quaint town itself, with its old peakedroofs and overhanging upper stories and numberless chimney-pots and narrow hill streets whereone can see old cobbles whenever the graceful cats afford space enough. Carter, the cats beingsomewhat dispersed by the half-seen zoogs, picked his way directly to the modest Temple of theElder Ones where the priests and old records were said to be; and once within that venerablecircular tower of ivied stone—which crowns Ulthar’s highest hill—he soughtout the patriarch Atal, who had been up the forbidden peak Hatheg-Kla in the stony desert andhad 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 learnedmany things about the gods, but mainly that they are indeed only earth’s gods, rulingfeebly 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 onyxstronghold 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 Barzai the Wise hadbeen drawn screaming into the sky for climbing merely the known peak of Hatheg-Kla. With unknownKadath, if ever found, matters would be much worse; for although earth’s gods may sometimesbe surpassed by a wise mortal, they are protected by the Other Gods from Outside, whom it isbetter not to discuss. At least twice in the world’s history the Other Gods set theirseal upon earth’s primal granite; once in antediluvian times, as guessed from a drawingin those parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts too ancient to be read, and once on Hatheg-Kla whenBarzai the Wise tried to see earth’s gods dancing by moonlight. So, Atal said, it wouldbe much better to let all gods alone except in tactful prayers.

Carter, though disappointed by Atal’s discouraging advice and by themeagre help to be found in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, didnot wholly despair. First he questioned the old priest about that marvellous sunset city seenfrom 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-worldand not to the general land of vision that many know; and conceivably it might be on anotherplanet. In that case earth’s gods could not guide him if they would. But this was notlikely, since the stopping of the dreams shewed pretty clearly that it was something the GreatOnes wished to hide from him.

Then Carter did a wicked thing, offering his guileless host so many draughtsof 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 imagereported by travellers as carved on the solid rock of the mountain Ngranek, on the isle of Oriabin the Southern Sea, and hinting that it may be a likeness which earth’s gods once wroughtof their own features in the days when they danced by moonlight on that mountain. And he hiccoughedlikewise that the features of that image are very strange, so that one might easily recognisethem, 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 ofmen, so that around the borders of the cold waste wherein stands Kadath the peasants must allbear their blood. This being so, the way to find that waste must be to see the stone face onNgranek and mark the features; then, having noted them with care, to search for such featuresamong living men. Where they are plainest and thickest, there must the gods dwell nearest; andwhatever 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 theirblood 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 faceswittingly; a thing which Carter realised even as he sought to scale Kadath. But they would havequeer lofty thoughts misunderstood by their fellows, and would sing of far places and gardensso unlike any known even in dreamland that common folk would call them fools; and from all thisone could perhaps learn old secrets of Kadath, or gain hints of the marvellous sunset city whichthe gods held secret. And more, one might in certain cases seize some well-loved child of agod as hostage; or even capture some young god himself, disguised and dwelling amongst men witha comely peasant maiden as his bride.

Atal, however, did not know how to find Ngranek on its isle of Oriab; and recommendedthat Carter follow the singing Skai under its bridges down to the Southern Sea; where no burgessof Ulthar has ever been, but whence the merchants come in boats or with long caravans of mulesand two-wheeled carts. There is a great city there, Dylath-Leen, but in Ulthar its reputationis bad because of the black three-banked galleys that sail to it with rubies from no clearlynamed 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 thatmerchants 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 Carterlaid 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 whythe zoogs had become so lax in their curious pursuit. Then he noticed all the sleek complacentcats of Ulthar licking their chops with unusual gusto, and recalled the spitting and caterwaulinghe 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 regardeda small black kitten in the cobbled street outside. And because he loved nothing on earth morethan small black kittens, he stooped and petted the sleek cats of Ulthar as they licked theirchops, 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 streetoverlooking the lower town. And as he went out on the balcony of his room and gazed down atthe sea of red tiled roofs and cobbled ways and the pleasant fields beyond, all mellow and magicalin 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 on toward unknown perils. Thentwilight fell, and the pink walls of the plastered gables turned violet and mystic, and littleyellow lights floated up one by one from old lattice windows. And sweet bells pealed in thetemple tower above, and the first star winked softly above the meadows across the Skai. Withthe night came song, and Carter nodded as the lutanists praised ancient days from beyond thefiligreed balconies and tessellated courts of simple Ulthar. And there might have been sweetnesseven in the voices of Ulthar’s many cats, but that they were mostly heavy and silent fromstrange feasting. Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which are known only to catsand 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 werestuffed with fragrant, drowsy herbs.

In the morning Carter joined a caravan of merchants bound for Dylath-Leen withthe spun wool of Ulthar and the cabbages of Ulthar’s busy farms. And for six days theyrode with tinkling bells on the smooth road beside the Skai; stopping some nights at the innsof little quaint fishing towns, and on other nights camping under the stars while snatches ofboatmen’s songs came from the placid river. The country was very beautiful, with greenhedges and groves and picturesque peaked cottages and octagonal windmills.

On the seventh day a blur of smoke arose on the horizon ahead, and then thetall black towers of Dylath-Leen, which is built mostly of basalt. Dylath-Leen with its thinangular towers looks in the distance like a bit of the Giants’ Causeway, and its streetsare dark and uninviting. There are many dismal sea-taverns near the myriad wharves, and allthe town is thronged with the strange seamen of every land on earth and of a few which are saidto be not on earth. Carter questioned the oddly robed men of that city about the peak of Ngranekon 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-ridefrom that port. But few had seen the stone face of the god, because it is on a very difficultside of Ngranek, which overlooks only sheer crags and a valley of sinister lava. Once the godswere 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’ssea-taverns, because they mostly preferred to whisper of the black galleys. One of them wasdue 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 werehumped up in two points above their foreheads was in especially bad taste. And their shoes werethe shortest and queerest ever seen in the Six Kingdoms. But worst of all was the matter ofthe unseen rowers. Those three banks of oars moved too briskly and accurately and vigorouslyto be comfortable, and it was not right for a ship to stay in port for weeks while the merchantstraded, 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 allthey ever took, those unpleasantly featured merchants and their unseen rowers; never anythingfrom the butchers and grocers, but only gold and the fat black men of Parg whom they boughtby the pound. And the odours from those galleys which the south wind blew in from the wharvesare not to be described. Only by constantly smoking strong thagweed could even the hardiest denizenof the old sea-taverns bear them. Dylath-Leen would never have tolerated the black galleys hadsuch rubies been obtainable elsewhere, but no mine in all earth’s dreamland was knownto produce their like.

Of these things Dylath-Leen’s cosmopolitan folk chiefly gossiped whilstCarter waited patiently for the ship from Baharna, which might bear him to the isle whereoncarven Ngranek towers lofty and barren. Meanwhile he did not fail to seek through the hauntsof far travellers for any tales they might have concerning Kadath in the cold waste or a marvellouscity 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 lookedqueerly intelligent when the cold waste was spoken of. This man was reputed to trade with thehorrible stone villages on the icy desert plateau of Leng, which no healthy folk visit and whoseevil fires are seen at night from afar. He was even rumoured to have dealt with that high-priestnot to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone ina prehistoric stone monastery. That such a person might well have had nibbling traffick withsuch beings as may conceivably dwell in the cold waste was not to be doubted, but Carter soonfound that it was no use questioning him.

Then the black galley slipped into the harbour past the basalt mole and thetall lighthouse, silent and alien, and with a strange stench that the south wind drove intothe town. Uneasiness rustled through the taverns along that waterfront, and after a while thedark wide-mouthed merchants with humped turbans and short feet clumped stealthily ashore toseek the bazaars of the jewellers. Carter observed them closely, and disliked them more thelonger he looked at them. Then he saw them drive the stout black men of Parg up the gangplankgrunting and sweating into that singular galley, and wondered in what lands—or if in anylands at all—those fat pathetic creatures might be destined to serve.

And on the third evening of that galley’s stay one of the uncomfortablemerchants spoke to him, smirking sinfully and hinting of what he had heard in the taverns ofCarter’s quest. He appeared to have knowledge too secret for public telling; and thoughthe sound of his voice was unbearably hateful, Carter felt that the lore of so far a travellermust not be overlooked. He bade him therefore be his own guest in locked chambers above, anddrew out the last of the zoogs’ moon-wine to loosen his tongue. The strange merchant drankheavily, but smirked unchanged by the draught. Then he drew forth a curious bottle with wineof his own, and Carter saw that the bottle was a single hollowed ruby, grotesquely carved inpatterns too fabulous to be comprehended. He offered his wine to his host, and though Cartertook 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 blanknessthe last thing he saw was that dark odious face convulsed with evil laughter, and somethingquite unspeakable where one of the two frontal puffs of that orange turban had become disarrangedwith the shakings of that epileptic mirth.

Carter next had consciousness amidst horrible odours beneath a tent-like awningon the deck of a ship, with the marvellous coasts of the Southern Sea flying by in unnaturalswiftness. 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 thatfiltered up through the sinister hatches. He saw slip past him the glorious lands and citiesof which a fellow-dreamer of earth—a lighthouse-keeper in ancient Kingsport—hadoften discoursed in the old days, and recognised the templed terraces of Zar, abode of forgottendreams; the spires of infamous Thalarion, that daemon-city of a thousand wonders where the eidolonLathi reigns; the charnal gardens of Xura, land of pleasures unattained, and the twin headlandsof crystal, meeting above in a resplendent arch, which guard the harbour of Sona-Nyl, blessedland of fancy.

Past all these gorgeous lands the malodorous ship flew unwholesomely, urgedby the abnormal strokes of those unseen rowers below. And before the day was done Carter sawthat the steersman could have no other goal than the Basalt Pillars of the West, beyond whichsimple folk say splendid Cathuria lies, but which wise dreamers well know are the gates of amonstrous cataract wherein the oceans of earth’s dreamland drop wholly to abysmal nothingnessand shoot through the empty spaces toward other worlds and other stars and the awful voids outsidethe ordered universe where the daemon-sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid poundingand 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 hisquest. It is understood in the land of dream that the Other Gods have many agents moving amongmen; and all these agents, whether wholly human or slightly less than human, are eager to workthe will of those blind and mindless things in return for the favour of their hideous soul andmessenger, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. So Carter inferred that the merchants of the humpedturbans, hearing of his daring search for the Great Ones in their castle on Kadath, had decidedto take him away and deliver him to Nyarlathothep for whatever nameless bounty might be offeredfor such a prize. What might be the land of those merchants, in our known universe or in theeldritch spaces outside, Carter could not guess; nor could he imagine at what hellish trysting-placethey 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 thedaemon Azathoth in the formless central void.

At the set of sun the merchants licked their excessively wide lips and glaredhungrily, and one of them went below and returned from some hidden and offensive cabin witha pot and basket of plates. Then they squatted close together beneath the awning and ate thesmoking meat that was passed around. But when they gave Carter a portion, he found somethingvery terrible in the size and shape of it; so that he turned even paler than before and castthat portion into the sea when no eye was on him. And again he thought of those unseen rowersbeneath, and of the suspicious nourishment from which their far too mechanical strength wasderived.

It was dark when the galley passed betwixt the Basalt Pillars of the West andthe sound of the ultimate cataract swelled portentous from ahead. And the spray of that cataractrose to obscure the stars, and the deck grew damp, and the vessel reeled in the surging currentof the brink. Then with a queer whistle and plunge the leap was taken, and Carter felt the terrorsof nightmare as earth fell away and the great boat shot silent and comet-like into planetaryspace. Never before had he known what shapeless black things lurk and caper and flounder allthrough the aether, leering and grinning at such voyagers as may pass, and sometimes feelingabout with slimy paws when some moving object excites their curiosity. These are the namelesslarvae of the Other Gods, and like them are blind and without mind, and possessed of singularhungers and thirsts.

But that offensive galley did not aim as far as Carter had feared, for he soonsaw 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 peaksuncomfortably. The ship made for the edge, and it soon became clear that its destination wasthat secret and mysterious side which is always turned away from the earth, and which no fullyhuman person, save perhaps the dreamer Snireth-Ko, has ever beheld. The close aspect of themoon as the galley drew near proved very disturbing to Carter, and he did not like the sizeand shape of the ruins which crumbled here and there. The dead temples on the mountains wereso placed that they could have glorified no wholesome or suitable gods, and in the symmetriesof the broken columns there seemed to lurk some dark and inner meaning which did not invitesolution. And what the structure and proportions of the olden worshippers could have been, Cartersteadily 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 wavesof a sluggish sea, and knew that the voyage was once more to be by water—or at least throughsome liquid. The galley struck the surface with a peculiar sound, and the odd elastic way thewaves received it was very perplexing to Carter. They now slid along at great speed, once passingand hailing another galley of kindred form, but generally seeing nothing but that curious seaand a sky that was black and star-strown even though the sun shone scorchingly in it.

There presently rose ahead the jagged hills of a leprous-looking coast, andCarter saw the thick unpleasant grey towers of a city. The way they leaned and bent, the mannerin which they were clustered, and the fact that they had no windows at all, was very disturbingto the prisoner; and he bitterly mourned the folly which had made him sip the curious wine ofthat merchant with the humped turban. As the coast drew nearer, and the hideous stench of thatcity grew stronger, he saw upon the jagged hills many forests, some of whose trees he recognisedas akin to that solitary moon-tree in the enchanted wood of earth, from whose sap the smallbrown zoogs ferment their peculiar wine.

Carter could now distinguish moving figures on the noisome wharves ahead, andthe better he saw them the worse he began to fear and detest them. For they were not men atall, or even approximately men, but great greyish-white slippery things which could expand andcontract at will, and whose principal shape—though it often changed—was that ofa sort of toad without any eyes, but with a curiously vibrating mass of short pink tentacleson 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 oroff some anchored galley with long oars in their fore paws. And now and then one would appeardriving a herd of clumping slaves, which indeed were approximate human beings with wide mouthslike those merchants who traded in Dylath-Leen; only these herds, being without turbans or shoesor clothing, did not seem so very human after all. Some of these slaves—the fatter ones,whom a sort of overseer would pinch experimentally—were unloaded from ships and nailedin crates which workers pushed into low warehouses or loaded on great lumbering vans.

Once a van was hitched up and driven off, and the fabulous thing which drewit was such that Carter gasped, even after having seen the other monstrosities of that hatefulplace. Now and then a small herd of slaves dressed and turbaned like the dark merchants wouldbe driven aboard a galley, followed by a great crew of the slippery grey toad-things as officers,navigators, and rowers. And Carter saw that the almost-human creatures were reserved for themore 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 whendressed and carefully shod and turbaned, and could haggle in the shops of men without embarrassmentor curious explanations. But most of them, unless lean and ill-favoured, were unclothed andpacked in crates and drawn off in lumbering lorries by fabulous things. Occasionally other beingswere unloaded and crated; some very like these semi-humans, some not so similar, and some notsimilar at all. And he wondered if any of the poor stout black men of Parg were left to be unloadedand crated and shipped inland in those obnoxious drays.

When the galley landed at a greasy-looking quay of spongy rock a nightmarehorde of toad-things wiggled out of the hatches, and two of them seized Carter and draggedhim ashore. The smell and aspect of that city are beyond telling, and Carter held only scatteredimages of the tiled streets and black doorways and endless precipices of grey vertical wallswithout windows. At length he was dragged within a low doorway and made to climb infinite stepsin pitch blackness. It was, apparently, all one to the toad-things whether it were light ordark. The odour of the place was intolerable, and when Carter was locked into a chamber andleft alone he scarcely had strength to crawl around and ascertain its form and dimensions. Itwas circular, and about twenty feet across.

From then on time ceased to exist. At intervals food was pushed in, but Carterwould not touch it. What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he was held forthe coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity’s Other Gods, the crawlingchaos Nyarlathotep. Finally, after an unguessed span of hours or days, the great stone doorswung wide again and Carter was shoved down the stairs and out into the red-litten streets ofthat fearsome city. It was night on the moon, and all through the town were stationed slavesbearing torches.

In a detestable square a sort of procession was formed; ten of the toad-thingsand 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 onealmost-human torch-bearer on each side of him. Certain of the toad-things produced disgustinglycarven flutes of ivory and made loathsome sounds. To that hellish piping the column advancedout of the tiled streets and into nighted plains of obscene fungi, soon commencing to climbone of the lower and more gradual hills that lay behind the city. That on some frightful slopeor blasphemous plateau the crawling chaos waited, Carter could not doubt; and he wished thatthe suspense might soon be over. The whining of those impious flutes was shocking, and he wouldhave given worlds for some even half-normal sound; but these toad-things had no voices, andthe slaves did not talk.

Then through that star-specked darkness there did come a normal sound. It rolledfrom the higher hills, and from all the jagged peaks around it was caught up and echoed in aswelling pandaemoniac chorus. It was the midnight yell of the cat, and Carter knew at last thatthe old village folk were right when they made low guesses about the cryptical realms whichare known only to cats, and to which the elders among cats repair by stealth nocturnally, springingfrom high housetops. Verily, it is to the moon’s dark side that they go to leap and gambolon the hills and converse with ancient shadows, and here amidst that column of foetid thingsCarter heard their homely, friendly cry, and thought of the steep roofs and warm hearths andlittle 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 evenas his lips opened he heard the chorus wax and draw nearer, and saw swift shadows against thestars as small graceful shapes leaped from hill to hill in gathering legions. The call of theclan had been given, and before the foul procession had time even to be frightened a cloud ofsmothering fur and a phalanx of murderous claws were tidally and tempestuously upon it. Theflutes stopped, and there were shrieks in the night. Dying almost-humans screamed, and catsspit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made never a sound as their stinking green ichoroozed fatally upon that porous earth with the obscene fungi.

It was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and Carter had never beforeseen so many cats. Black, grey, and white; yellow, tiger, and mixed; common, Persian, and Manx;Thibetan, Angora, and Egyptian; all were there in the fury of battle, and there hovered overthem some trace of that profound and inviolate sanctity which made their goddess great in thetemples of Bubastis. They would leap seven strong at the throat of an almost-human or the pinktentacled snout of a toad-thing and drag it down savagely to the fungous plain, where myriadsof their fellows would surge over it and into it with the frenzied claws and teeth of a divinebattle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a stricken slave, but was soon overborne by thesurging waves of his loyal defenders. Then he lay in the utter blackness hearing the clangourof war and the shouts of the victors, and feeling the soft paws of his friends as they rushedto and fro over him in the fray.

At last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again itwas upon a strange scene. The great shining disc of the earth, thirteen times greater than thatof the moon as we see it, had risen with floods of weird light over the lunar landscape; andacross all those leagues of wild plateau and ragged crest there squatted one endless sea ofcats in orderly array. Circle on circle they reached, and two or three leaders out of the rankswere licking his face and purring to him consolingly. Of the dead slaves and toad-things therewere not many signs, but Carter thought he saw one bone a little way off in the open space betweenhim and the beginning of the solid circles of the warriors.

Carter now spoke with the leaders in the soft language of cats, and learnedthat his ancient friendship with the species was well known and often spoken of in the placeswhere cats congregate. He had not been unmarked in Ulthar when he passed through, and the sleekold cats had remembered how he petted them after they had attended to the hungry zoogs who lookedevilly at a small black kitten. And they recalled, too, how he had welcomed the very littlekitten who came to see him at the inn, and how he had given it a saucer of rich cream in themorning before he left. The grandfather of that very little kitten was the leader of the armynow assembled, for he had seen the evil procession from a far hill and recognised the prisoneras a sworn friend of his kind on earth and in the land of dream.

A yowl now came from a farther peak, and the old leader paused abruptly inhis conversation. It was one of the army’s outposts, stationed on the highest of the mountainsto 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. Theyare leagued by treaty with the evil toad-things, and are notoriously hostile to our earthlycats; 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 closerformation, crowding protectingly around Carter and preparing to take the great leap throughspace back to the housetops of our earth and its dreamland. The old field-marshal advised Carterto let himself be borne along smoothly and passively in the massed ranks of furry leapers, andtold him how to spring when the rest sprang and land gracefully when the rest landed. He alsooffered to deposit him in any spot he desired, and Carter decided on the city of Dylath-Leenwhence the black galley had set out; for he wished to sail thence for Oriab and the carven crestof 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 ablack cave on a far unhallowed summit of the moon-mountains still vainly waited the crawlingchaos Nyarlathotep.

The leap of the cats through space was very swift; and being surrounded byhis companions, Carter did not see this time the great black shapelessnesses that lurk and caperand flounder in the abyss. Before he fully realised what had happened he was back in his familiarroom at the inn at Dylath-Leen, and the stealthy, friendly cats were pouring out of the windowin streams. The old leader from Ulthar was the last to leave, and as Carter shook his paw hesaid he would be able to get home by co*ckcrow. When dawn came, Carter went downstairs and learnedthat a week had elapsed since his capture and leaving. There was still nearly a fortnight towait for the ship bound toward Oriab, and during that time he said what he could against theblack galleys and their infamous ways. Most of the townsfolk believed him; yet so fond werethe jewellers of great rubies that none would wholly promise to cease trafficking with the wide-mouthedmerchants. If aught of evil ever befalls Dylath-Leen through such traffick, it will not be hisfault.

In about a week the desiderate ship put in by the black mole and tall lighthouse,and Carter was glad to see that she was a barque of wholesome men, with painted sides and yellowlateen sails and a grey captain in silken robes. Her cargo was the fragrant resin of Oriab’sinner groves, and the delicate pottery baked by the artists of Baharna, and the strange littlefigures carved from Ngranek’s ancient lava. For this they were paid in the wool of Ultharand the iridescent textiles of Hatheg and the ivory that the black men carve across the riverin Parg. Carter made arrangements with the captain to go to Baharna and was told that the voyagewould 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 contentto learn its legends from old people and lava-gatherers and image-makers in Baharna and afterwardsay in their far homes that they have indeed beheld it. The captain was not even sure that anyperson now living had beheld that carven face, for the wrong side of Ngranek is very difficultand 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 cattleare known to haunt most persistently the dreams of those who think too often of them. Then Carterasked that captain about unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and the marvellous sunset city, butof these the good man could truly tell nothing.

Carter sailed out of Dylath-Leen one early morning when the tide turned, andsaw the first rays of sunrise on the thin angular towers of that dismal basalt town. And fortwo days they sailed eastward in sight of green coasts, and saw often the pleasant fishing townsthat climbed up steeply with their red roofs and chimney-pots from old dreaming wharves andbeaches where nets lay drying. But on the third day they turned sharply south where the rollof the water was stronger, and soon passed from sight of any land. On the fifth day the sailorswere nervous, but the captain apologised for their fears, saying that the ship was about topass over the weedy walls and broken columns of a sunken city too old for memory, and that whenthe water was clear one could see so many moving shadows in that deep place that simple folkdisliked it. He admitted, moreover, that many ships had been lost in that part of the sea; havingbeen 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 inthe water. There was so little wind that the ship could not move much, and the ocean was verycalm. Looking over the rail Carter saw many fathoms deep the dome of a great temple, and infront of it an avenue of unnatural sphinxes leading to what was once a public square. Dolphinssported merrily in and out of the ruins, and porpoises revelled clumsily here and there, sometimescoming to the surface and leaping clear out of the sea. As the ship drifted on a little thefloor of the ocean rose in hills, and one could clearly mark the lines of ancient climbing streetsand the washed-down walls of myriad little houses.

Then the suburbs appeared, and finally a great lone building on a hill, ofsimpler architecture than the other structures, and in much better repair. It was dark and lowand 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 drapedthe greater part; and such was its lonely and impressive place on that far hill that it mayhave been a temple or monastery. Some phosphorescent fish inside it gave the small round windowsan aspect of shining, and Carter did not blame the sailors much for their fears. Then by thewatery moonlight he noticed an odd high monolith in the middle of that central court, and sawthat something was tied to it. And when after getting a telescope from the captain’s cabinhe saw that that bound thing was a sailor in the silk robes of Oriab, head downward and withoutany eyes, he was glad that a rising breeze soon took the ship ahead to more healthy parts ofthe sea.

The next day they spoke with a ship with violet sails bound for Zar, in the landof forgotten dreams, with bulbs of strange coloured lilies for cargo. And on the evening ofthe eleventh day they came in sight of the isle of Oriab, with Ngranek rising jagged and snow-crownedin the distance. Oriab is a very great isle, and its port of Baharna a mighty city. The wharvesof Baharna are of porphyry, and the city rises in great stone terraces behind them, having streetsof steps that are frequently arched over by buildings and the bridges between buildings. Thereis a great canal which goes under the whole city in a tunnel with granite gates and leads tothe inland lake of Yath, on whose farther shore are the vast clay-brick ruins of a primal citywhose name is not remembered. As the ship drew into the harbour at evening the twin beaconsThon and Thal gleamed a welcome, and in all the million windows of Baharna’s terracesmellow lights peeped out quietly and gradually as the stars peep out overhead in the dusk, tillthat steep and climbing seaport became a glittering constellation hung between the stars ofheaven and the reflections of those stars in the still harbour.

The captain, after landing, made Carter a guest in his own small house on theshore of Yath where the rear of the town slopes down to it; and his wife and servants broughtstrange toothsome foods for the traveller’s delight. And in the days after that Carterasked for rumours and legends of Ngranek in all the taverns and public places where lava-gatherersand image-makers meet, but could find no one who had been up the higher slopes or seen the carvenface. Ngranek was a hard mountain with only an accursed valley behind it, and besides, one couldnever depend on the certainty that night-gaunts are altogether fabulous.

When the captain sailed back to Dylath-Leen Carter took quarters in an ancienttavern opening on an alley of steps in the original part of the town, which is built of brickand resembles the ruins of Yath’s farther shore. Here he laid his plans for the ascentof 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 greathelp. He even took Carter to an upper room in that ancient house and shewed him a crude picturewhich a traveller had scratched on the clay wall in the olden days when men were bolder andless reluctant to visit Ngranek’s higher slopes. The old tavern-keeper’s great-grandfatherhad heard from his great-grandfather that the traveller who scratched that picture had climbedNgranek and seen the carven face, here drawing it for others to behold; but Carter had verygreat doubts, since the large rough features on the wall were hasty and careless, and whollyovershadowed by a crowd of little companion shapes in the worst possible taste, with horns andwings and claws and curling tails.

At last, having gained all the information he was likely to gain in the tavernsand public places of Baharna, Carter hired a zebra and set out one morning on the road by Yath’sshore for those inland parts wherein towers stony Ngranek. On his right were rolling hills andpleasant orchards and neat little stone farmhouses, and he was much reminded of those fertilefields that flank the Skai. By evening he was near the nameless ancient ruins on Yath’sfarther shore, and though old lava-gatherers had warned him not to camp there at night, he tetheredhis zebra to a curious pillar before a crumbling wall and laid his blanket in a sheltered cornerbeneath 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 ofsome insect brushing his face he covered his head altogether and slept in peace till rousedby the magah birds in distant resin groves.

The sun had just come up over the great slope whereon leagues of primal brickfoundations and worn walls and occasional cracked pillars and pedestals stretched down desolateto the shore of Yath, and Carter looked about for his tethered zebra. Great was his dismay tosee 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 allsucked away through a singular wound in its throat. His pack had been disturbed, and severalshiny knick-knacks taken away, and all around on the dusty soil were great webbed footprintsfor which he could not in any way account. The legends and warnings of lava-gatherers occurredto him and he thought of what had brushed his face in the night. Then he shouldered his packand strode on toward Ngranek, though not without a shiver when he saw close to him as the highwaypassed through the ruins a great gaping arch low in the wall of an old temple, with steps leadingdown into darkness farther than he could peer.

His course now led uphill through wilder and partly wooded country, and hesaw only the huts of charcoal-burners and the camps of those who gathered resin from the groves.The whole air was fragrant with balsam, and all the magah birds sang blithely as they flashedtheir seven colours in the sun. Near sunset he came on a new camp of lava-gatherers returningwith laden sacks from Ngranek’s lower slopes; and here he also camped, listening to thesongs 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 returnto his fellows. When they looked for him the next day they found only his turban, nor was thereany sign on the crags below that he had fallen. They did not search any more, because the oldmen among them said it would be of no use. No one ever found what the night-gaunts took, thoughthose beasts themselves were so uncertain as to be almost fabulous. Carter asked them if night-gauntssucked blood and liked shiny things and left webbed footprints, but they all shook their headsnegatively and seemed frightened at his making such an inquiry. When he saw how taciturn theyhad 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 theyrode west and he rode east on a zebra he had bought of them. Their older men gave him blessingsand warnings, and told him he had better not climb too high on Ngranek, but while he thankedthem heartily he was in no wise dissuaded. For still did he feel that he must find the godson 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-peoplewho had once dwelt thus close to Ngranek and carved images from its smooth lava. Here they haddwelt till the days of the old tavern-keeper’s grandfather, but about that time they feltthat 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 decidedit would be better to leave altogether, since things were sometimes glimpsed in the darknesswhich no one could interpret favourably; so in the end all of them went down to the sea anddwelt in Baharna, inhabiting a very old quarter and teaching their sons the old art of image-makingwhich to this day they carry on. It was from these children of the exiled hill-people that Carterhad 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 higheras Carter approached it. There were sparse trees on the lower slope, and feeble shrubs abovethem, and then the bare hideous rock rose spectral into the sky to mix with frost and ice andeternal snow. Carter could see the rifts and ruggedness of that sombre stone, and did not welcomethe prospect of climbing it. In places there were solid streams of lava, and scoriac heaps thatlittered slopes and ledges. Ninety aeons ago, before even the gods had danced upon its pointedpeak, that mountain had spoken with fire and roared with the voices of the inner thunders. Nowit towered all silent and sinister, bearing on the hidden side that secret titan image whereofrumour told. And there were caves in that mountain, which might be empty and alone with elderdarkness, 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 scruboaks and ash trees, and strown with bits of rock, lava, and ancient cinder. There were the charredembers of many camps, where the lava-gatherers were wont to stop, and several rude altars whichthey had built either to propitiate the Great Ones or to ward off what they dreamed of in Ngranek’shigh passes and labyrinthine caves. At evening Carter reached the farthermost pile of embersand camped for the night, tethering his zebra to a sapling and wrapping himself well in hisblanket before going to sleep. And all through the night a voonith howled distantly from theshore of some hidden pool, but Carter felt no fear of that amphibious terror, since he had beentold with certainty that not one of them dares even approach the slopes of Ngranek.

In the clear sunshine of morning Carter began the long ascent, taking his zebraas far as that useful beast could go, but tying it to a stunted ash tree when the floor of thethin road became too steep. Thereafter he scrambled up alone; first through the forest withits ruins of old villages in overgrown clearings, and then over the tough grass where anaemicshrubs grew here and there. He regretted coming clear of the trees, since the slope was veryprecipitous and the whole thing rather dizzying. At length he began to discern all the countrysidespread out beneath him whenever he looked around; the deserted huts of the image-makers, thegroves of resin trees and the camps of those who gathered from them, the woods where prismaticmagahs nest and sing, and even a hint very far away of the shores of Yath and of those forbiddingancient ruins whose name is forgotten. He found it best not to look around, and kept on climbingand climbing till the shrubs became very sparse and there was often nothing but the tough grassto 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 thebare 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 occasionallythe sign of some lava-gatherer scratched clumsily in the friable stone, and know that wholesomehuman creatures had been there before him. After a certain height the presence of man was furthershewn by hand-holds and foot-holds hewn where they were needed, and by little quarries and excavationswhere some choice vein or stream of lava had been found. In one place a narrow ledge had beenchopped 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 landscapebelow. All the island betwixt him and the coast lay open to his sight, with Baharna’sstone terraces and the smoke of its chimneys mystical in the distance. And beyond that the illimitableSouthern Sea with all its curious secrets.

Thus far there had been much winding around the mountain, so that the fartherand carven side was still hidden. Carter now saw a ledge running upward and to the left whichseemed 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 whichwould, unless suddenly interrupted or deflected, bring him after a few hours’ climbingto 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 seawardlands he had traversed. The mountain’s side, too, was somewhat different; being here piercedby curious cracks and caves not found on the straighter route he had left. Some of these wereabove him and some beneath him, all opening on sheerly perpendicular cliffs and wholly unreachableby the feet of man. The air was very cold now, but so hard was the climbing that he did notmind it. Only the increasing rarity bothered him, and he thought that perhaps it was this whichhad turned the heads of other travellers and excited those absurd tales of night-gaunts wherebythey explained the loss of such climbers as fell from these perilous paths. He was not muchimpressed 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 thetrack of the gods atop unknown Kadath.

At last, in the fearsome iciness of upper space, he came round fully to thehidden side of Ngranek and saw in infinite gulfs below him the lesser crags and sterile abyssesof lava which marked the olden wrath of the Great Ones. There was unfolded, too, a vast expanseof country to the south; but it was a desert land without fair fields or cottage chimneys, andseemed to have no ending. No trace of the sea was visible on this side, for Oriab is a greatisland. Black caverns and odd crevices were still numerous on the sheer vertical cliffs, butnone of them was accessible to a climber. There now loomed aloft a great beetling mass whichhampered 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 onlyslippery walls of rock on the other, he knew for a moment the fear that makes men shun Ngranek’shidden 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 dreamercould have used those imperceptible foot-holds, yet to Carter they were sufficient. Surmountingnow the outward-hanging rock, he found the slope above much easier than that below, since agreat glacier’s melting had left a generous space with loam and ledges. To the left aprecipice dropped straight from unknown heights to unknown depths, with a cave’s darkmouth just out of reach above him. Elsewhere, however, the mountain slanted back strongly, andeven gave him space to lean and rest.

He felt from the chill that he must be near the snow line, and looked up tosee what glittering pinnacles might be shining in that late ruddy sunlight. Surely enough, therewas the snow uncounted thousands of feet above, and below it a great beetling crag like thathe had just climbed; hanging there forever in bold outline, black against the white of the frozenpeak. And when he saw that crag he gasped and cried out aloud, and clutched at the jagged rockin awe; for the titan bulge had not stayed as earth’s dawn had shaped it, but gleamedred 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 vastit was no mind can ever measure, but Carter knew at once that man could never have fashionedit. It was a god chiselled by the hands of the gods, and it looked down haughty and majesticupon the seeker. Rumour had said it was strange and not to be mistaken, and Carter saw thatit was indeed so; for those long narrow eyes and long-lobed ears, and that thin nose and pointedchin, all spoke of a race that is not of men but of gods. He clung overawed in that lofty andperilous eyrie, even though it was this which he had expected and come to find; for there isin a god’s face more of marvel than prediction can tell, and when that face is vasterthan a great temple and seen looking down at sunset in the cryptic silences of that upper worldfrom whose dark lava it was divinely hewn of old, the marvel is so strong that none may escapeit.

Here, too, was the added marvel of recognition; for although he had plannedto search all dreamland over for those whose likeness to this face might mark them as the gods’children, he now knew that he need not do so. Certainly, the great face carven on that mountainwas of no strange sort, but the kin of such as he had seen often in the taverns of the seaportCelephaîs which lies in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills and is ruled over by thatKing Kuranes whom Carter once knew in waking life. Every year sailors with such a face camein dark ships from the north to trade their onyx for the carved jade and spun gold and littlered singing birds of Celephaîs, and it was clear that these could be no others than thehalf-gods he sought. Where they dwelt, there must the cold waste lie close, and within it unknownKadath and its onyx castle for the Great Ones. So to Celephaîs he must go, far distantfrom the isle of Oriab, and in such parts as would take him back to Dylath-Leen and up the Skaito the bridge by Nir, and again into the enchanted wood of the zoogs, whence the way would bendnorthward through the garden lands by Oukranos to the gilded spires of Thran, where he mightfind a galleon bound over the Cerenerian Sea.

But dusk was now thick, and the great carven face looked down even sternerin shadow. Perched on that ledge night found the seeker; and in the blackness he might neithergo 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 tothe crags and sharp rocks of the accursed valley. The stars came out, but save for them therewas only black nothingness in his eyes; nothingness leagued with death, against whose beckoninghe might do no more than cling to the rocks and lean back away from an unseen brink. The lastthing of earth that he saw in the gloaming was a condor soaring close to the westward precipicebeside him, and darting screaming away when it came near the cave whose mouth yawned just outof reach.

Suddenly, without a warning sound in the dark, Carter felt his curved scimitardrawn stealthily out of his belt by some unseen hand. Then he heard it clatter down over therocks below. And between him and the Milky Way he thought he saw a very terrible outline ofsomething noxiously thin and horned and tailed and bat-winged. Other things, too, had begunto blot out patches of stars west of him, as if a flock of vague entities were flapping thicklyand silently out of that inaccessible cave in the face of the precipice. Then a sort of coldrubbery arm seized his neck and something else seized his feet, and he was lifted inconsideratelyup and swung about in space. Another minute and the stars were gone, and Carter knew that thenight-gaunts had got him.

They bore him breathless into that cliffside cavern and through monstrous labyrinthsbeyond. 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 membraneous wings were silent. They werefrightfully cold and damp and slippery, and their paws kneaded one detestably. Soon they wereplunging hideously downward through inconceivable abysses in a whirling, giddying, sickeningrush of dank, tomb-like air; and Carter felt they were shooting into the ultimate vortexof shrieking and daemonic madness. He screamed again and again, but whenever he did so the blackpaws tickled him with greater subtlety. Then he saw a sort of grey phosphorescence about, andguessed they were coming even to that inner world of subterrene horror of which dim legendstell, and which is litten only by the pale death-fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish air and theprimal mists of the pits at earth’s core.

At last far below him he saw faint lines of grey and ominous pinnacleswhich he knew must be the fabled Peaks of Thok. Awful and sinister they stand in the haunteddusk of sunless and eternal depths; higher than man may reckon, and guarding terrible valleyswhere the bholes crawl and burrow nastily. But Carter preferred to look at them than at hiscaptors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black beings 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 ofall, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smilewith, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutchand fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.

As the band flew lower the Peaks of Thok rose grey and towering on all sides,and one saw clearly that nothing lived on that austere and impassive granite of the endlesstwilight. At still lower levels the death-fires in the air gave out, and one met only the primalblackness of the void save aloft where the thin peaks stood out goblin-like. Soon the peakswere very far away, and nothing about but great rushing winds with the dankness of nethermostgrottoes in them. Then in the end the night-gaunts landed on a floor of unseen things whichfelt like layers of bones, and left Carter all alone in that black valley. To bring him thitherwas 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 Thokhad faded out of sight. There was nothing anywhere but blackness and horror and silence andbones.

Now Carter knew from a certain source that he was in the vale of Pnath, wherecrawl and burrow the enormous bholes; but he did not know what to expect, because no one hasever seen a bhole or even guessed what such a thing may be like. Bholes are known only by dimrumour, from the rustling they make amongst mountains of bones and the slimy touch they havewhen they wriggle past one. They cannot be seen because they creep only in the dark. Carterdid not wish to meet a bhole, so listened intently for any sound in the unknown depths of bonesabout him. Even in this fearsome place he had a plan and an objective, for whispers of Pnathand its approaches were not unknown to one with whom he had talked much in the old days. Inbrief, it seemed fairly likely that this was the spot into which all the ghouls of the wakingworld cast the refuse of their feastings; and that if he but had good luck he might stumbleupon that mighty crag taller even than Thok’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 letdown 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 secretstudio in an ancient and unhallowed alley near a graveyard—had actually made friends withthe ghouls and had taught him to understand the simpler part of their disgusting meeping andglibbering. This man had vanished at last, and Carter was not sure but that he might find himnow, and use for the first time in dreamland that far-away English of his dim waking life. Inany case, he felt he could persuade a ghoul to guide him out of Pnath; and it would be betterto meet a ghoul, which one can see, than a bhole, which one cannot see.

So Carter walked in the dark, and ran when he thought he heard something amongthe bones underfoot. Once he bumped into a stony slope, and knew it must be the base of oneof Thok’s peaks. Then at last he heard a monstrous rattling and clatter which reachedfar up in the air, and became sure he had come nigh the crag of the ghouls. He was not surehe could be heard from this valley miles below, but realised that the inner world has strangelaws. 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 meepingcry which is the call of the ghoul.

Sound travels slowly, so that it was some time before he heard an answeringglibber. 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 stirredup among those bones by his shouting. Indeed, it was not long before he actually did hear avague 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 tensiongrew almost unbearable, and he was about to flee in panic when the thud of something on thenewly heaped bones nearby drew his notice from the other sound. It was the ladder, and aftera minute of groping he had it taut in his hands. But the other sound did not cease, and followedhim even as he climbed. He had gone fully five feet from the ground when the rattling beneathwaxed emphatic, and was a good ten feet up when something swayed the ladder from below. At aheight which must have been fifteen or twenty feet he felt his whole side brushed by a greatslippery length which grew alternately convex and concave with wriggling, and thereafter heclimbed desperately to escape the unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed bhole whoseform no man might see.

For hours he climbed with aching arms and blistered hands, seeing again thegrey death-fire and Thok’s uncomfortable pinnacles. At last he discerned above him theprojecting edge of the great crag of the ghouls, whose vertical side he could not glimpse; andhours later he saw a curious face peering over it as a gargoyle peers over a parapet of NotreDame. This almost made him lose his hold through faintness, but a moment later he was himselfa*gain; for his vanished friend Richard Pickman had once introduced him to a ghoul, and he knewwell their canine faces and slumping forms and unmentionable idiosyncrasies. So he had himselfwell under control when that hideous thing pulled him out of the dizzy emptiness over the edgeof the crag, and did not scream at the partly consumed refuse heaped at one side or at the squattingcircles of ghouls who gnawed and watched curiously.

He was now on a dim-litten plain whose sole topographical features were greatboulders and the entrances of burrows. The ghouls were in general respectful, even if one didattempt to pinch him while several others eyed his leanness speculatively. Through patient glibberinghe made inquiries regarding his vanished friend, and found he had become a ghoul of some prominencein abysses nearer the waking world. A greenish elderly ghoul offered to conduct him to Pickman’spresent habitation, so despite a natural loathing he followed the creature into a capaciousburrow and crawled after him for hours in the blackness of rank mould. They emerged on a dimplain strown with singular relics of earth—old gravestones, broken urns, and grotesquefragments of monuments—and Carter realised with some emotion that he was probably nearerthe waking world than at any other time since he had gone down the seven hundred steps fromthe cavern of flame to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.

There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston,sat the ghoul which was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery, andhad 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 andmonosyllables, helped out now and then by the glibbering of ghouls. When it learned that Carterwished to get to the enchanted wood and from there to the city Celephaîs in Ooth-Nargaibeyond the Tanarian Hills, it seemed rather doubtful; for these ghouls of the waking world dono business in the graveyards of upper dreamland (leaving that to the web-footed wamps thatare spawned in dead cities), and many things intervene betwixt their gulf and the enchantedwood, including the terrible kingdom of the gugs.

The gugs, hairy and gigantic, once reared stone circles in that wood and madestrange sacrifices to the Other Gods and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, until one night anabomination of theirs reached the ears of earth’s gods and they were banished to cavernsbelow. Only a great trap-door of stone with an iron ring connects the abyss of the earth-ghoulswith the enchanted wood, and this the gugs are afraid to open because of a curse. That a mortaldreamer could traverse their cavern realm and leave by that door is inconceivable; for mortaldreamers were their former food, and they have legends of the toothsomeness of such dreamerseven though banishment has restricted their diet to the ghasts, those repulsive beings whichdie 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 wingeddiorite lions lead down from dreamland to the lower gulfs, or to return through a churchyardto the waking world and begin the quest anew down the seventy steps of light slumber to thecavern of flame and the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchantedwood. 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. Itwere disastrous to his quest to forget the august and celestial faces of those seamen from thenorth who traded onyx in Celephaîs, and who, being the sons of gods, must point the wayto the cold waste and Kadath where the Great Ones dwell.

After much persuasion the ghoul consented to guide his guest inside the greatwall of the gugs’ kingdom. There was one chance that Carter might be able to steal throughthat twilight realm of circular stone towers at an hour when the giants would be all gorgedand snoring indoors, and reach the central tower with the sign of Koth upon it, which has thestairs leading up to that stone trap-door in the enchanted wood. Pickman even consented to lendthree ghouls to help with a tombstone lever in raising the stone door; for of ghouls the gugsare somewhat afraid, and they often flee from their own colossal graveyards when they see feastingthere.

He also advised Carter to disguise as a ghoul himself; shaving the beard hehad allowed to grow (for ghouls have none), wallowing naked in the mould to get the correctsurface, and loping in the usual slumping way, with his clothing carried in a bundle as if itwere a choice morsel from a tomb. They would reach the city of the gugs—which is coterminouswith the whole kingdom—through the proper burrows, emerging in a cemetery not far fromthe 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 theremurderously for those denizens of the upper abyss who hunt and prey on them. The ghasts tryto come out when the gugs sleep, and they attack ghouls as readily as gugs, for they cannotdiscriminate. They are very primitive, and eat one another. The gugs have a sentry at a narrowplace in the vaults of Zin, but he is often drowsy and is sometimes surprised by a party ofghasts. Though ghasts cannot live in real light, they can endure the grey twilight of the abyssfor hours.

So at length Carter crawled through endless burrows with three helpful ghoulsbearing the slate gravestone of Col. Nehemiah Derby, obiit 1719, from the Charter Street BuryingGround in Salem. When they came again into open twilight they were in a forest of vast lichenedmonoliths reaching nearly as high as the eye could see and forming the modest gravestones ofthe 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 ofinner earth. This was the great city of the gugs, whose doorways are thirty feet high. Ghoulscome here often, for a buried gug will feed a community for almost a year, and even with theadded peril it is better to burrow for gugs than to bother with the graves of men. Carter nowunderstood the occasional titan bones he had felt beneath him in the vale of Pnath.

Straight ahead, and just outside the cemetery, rose a sheer perpendicular cliffat whose base an immense and forbidding cavern yawned. This the ghouls told Carter to avoidas much as possible, since it was the entrance to the unhallowed vaults of Zin where gugs huntghasts in the darkness. And truly, that warning was soon well justified; for the moment a ghoulbegan to creep toward the towers to see if the hour of the gugs’ resting had been rightlytimed, there glowed in the gloom of that great cavern’s mouth first one pair of yellowish-redeyes and then another, implying that the gugs were one sentry less, and that ghasts have indeedan excellent sharpness of smell. So the ghoul returned to the burrow and motioned his companionsto be silent. It was best to leave the ghasts to their own devices, and there was a possibilitythat they might soon withdraw, since they must naturally be rather tired after coping with agug sentry in the black vaults. After a moment something about the size of a small horse hoppedout into the grey twilight, and Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous and unwholesomebeast, whose face is so curiously human despite the absence of a nose, a forehead, and otherimportant particulars.

Presently three other ghasts hopped out to join their fellow, and a ghoul glibberedsoftly at Carter that their absence of battle-scars was a bad sign. It proved that they hadnot fought the gug sentry at all, but merely slipped past him as he slept, so that their strengthand savagery were still unimpaired and would remain so till they had found and disposed of avictim. It was very unpleasant to see those filthy and disproportioned animals, which soon numberedabout fifteen, grubbing about and making their kangaroo leaps in the grey twilight where titantowers and monoliths arose, but it was still more unpleasant when they spoke among themselvesin the coughing gutturals of ghasts. And yet, horrible as they were, they were not so horribleas 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 formidabletalons. After it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both ofthe paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakenedgug sentry, large as a barrel, wobbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side,shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terriblebecause of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom ofthe head, opening vertically instead of horizontally.

But before that unfortunate gug could emerge from the cave and rise to hisfull twenty feet, the vindictive ghasts were upon him. Carter feared for a moment that he wouldgive 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 tearingwith their muzzles, and mauling murderously with their hard pointed hooves. All the time theycoughed excitedly, screaming when the great vertical mouth of the gug would occasionally biteinto one of their number, so that the noise of the combat would surely have aroused the sleepingcity had not the weakening of the sentry begun to transfer the action farther and farther withinthe cavern. As it was, the tumult soon receded altogether from sight in the blackness, withonly occasional evil echoes to mark its continuance.

Then the most alert of the ghouls gave the signal for all to advance, and Carterfollowed the loping three out of the forest of monoliths and into the dark noisome streets ofthat awful city whose rounded towers of Cyclopean stone soared up beyond the sight. Silentlythey shambled over that rough rock pavement, hearing with disgust the abominable muffled snortingsfrom great black doorways which marked the slumber of the gugs. Apprehensive of the ending ofthe 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 asomewhat open space before a tower even vaster than the rest, above whose colossal doorway wasfixed a monstrous symbol in bas-relief which made one shudder without knowing its meaning. Thiswas the central tower with the sign of Koth, and those huge stone steps just visible throughthe dusk within were the beginning of the great flight leading to upper dreamland and the enchantedwood.

There now began a climb of interminable length in utter blackness; made almostimpossible by the monstrous size of the steps, which were fashioned for gugs, and were thereforenearly a yard high. Of their number Carter could form no just estimate, for he soon became soworn out that the tireless and elastic ghouls were forced to aid him. All through the endlessclimb there lurked the peril of detection and pursuit; for though no gug dares lift the stonedoor to the forest because of the Great Ones’ curse, there are no such restraints concerningthe tower and the steps, and escaped ghasts are often chased even to the very top. So sharpare the ears of gugs, that the bare feet and hands of the climbers might readily be heard whenthe city awoke; and it would of course take but little time for the striding giants, accustomedfrom their ghast-hunts in the vaults of Zin to seeing without light, to overtake their smallerand slower quarry on those Cyclopean steps. It was very depressing to reflect that the silentpursuing gugs would not be heard at all, but would come very suddenly and shockingly in thedark upon the climbers. Nor could the traditional fear of gugs for ghouls be depended upon inthat peculiar place where the advantages lay so heavily with the gugs. There was also some perilfrom the furtive and venomous ghasts, which frequently hopped up into the tower during the sleephour of the gugs. If the gugs slept long, and the ghasts returned soon from their deed in thecavern, the scent of the climbers might easily be picked up by those loathsome and ill-disposedthings; 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 perhapseven more, had strayed into that tower before the coming of Carter and his guides; and it wasequally clear that this peril was very close. After a breathless second the leading ghoul pushedCarter to the wall and arranged his two kinsfolk in the best possible way, with the old slatetombstone raised for a crushing blow whenever the enemy might come in sight. Ghouls can seein the dark, so the party was not as badly off as Carter would have been alone. In another momentthe clatter of hooves revealed the downward hopping of at least one beast, and the slab-bearingghouls poised their weapon for a desperate blow. Presently two yellowish-red eyes flashed intoview, and the panting of the ghast became audible above its clattering. As it hopped down tothe step just above the ghouls, they wielded the ancient gravestone with prodigious force, sothat there was only a wheeze and a choking before the victim collapsed in a noxious heap. Thereseemed to be only this one animal, and after a moment of listening the ghouls tapped Carteras a signal to proceed again. As before, they were obliged to aid him; and he was glad to leavethat 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 thingcompletely was not to be thought of, but the ghouls hoped to get it up just enough to slip thegravestone under as a prop, and permit Carter to escape through the crack. They themselves plannedto 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 theabyss.

Mighty was the straining of those three ghouls at the stone of the door abovethem, and Carter helped push with as much strength as he had. They judged the edge next thetop of the staircase to be the right one, and to this they bent all the force of their disreputablynourished muscles. After a few moments a crack of light appeared; and Carter, to whom that taskhad been entrusted, slipped the end of the old gravestone in the aperture. There now ensueda mighty heaving; but progress was very slow, and they had of course to return to their firstposition every time they failed to turn the slab and prop the portal open.

Suddenly their desperation was magnified a thousandfold by a sound on the stepsbelow them. It was only the thumping and rattling of the slain ghast’s hooved body asit rolled down to lower levels; but of all the possible causes of that body’s dislodgmentand rolling, none was in the least reassuring. Therefore, knowing the ways of gugs, the ghoulsset to with something of a frenzy; and in a surprisingly short time had the door so high thatthey were able to hold it still whilst Carter turned the slab and left a generous opening. Theynow helped Carter through, letting him climb up to their rubbery shoulders and later guidinghis feet as he clutched at the blessed soil of the upper dreamland outside. Another second andthey were through themselves, knocking away the gravestone and closing the great trap-door whilea panting became audible beneath. Because of the Great Ones’ curse no gug might ever emergefrom that portal, so with a deep relief and sense of repose Carter lay quietly on the thickgrotesque fungi of the enchanted wood while his guides squatted near in the manner that ghoulsrest.

Weird as was that enchanted wood through which he had fared so long ago, itwas verily a haven and a delight after the gulfs he had now left behind. There was no livingdenizen about, for zoogs shun the mysterious door in fear, and Carter at once consulted withhis ghouls about their future course. To return through the tower they no longer dared, andthe waking world did not appeal to them when they learned that they must pass the priests Nashtand Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame. So at length they decided to return through Sarkomandand its gate of the abyss, though of how to get there they knew nothing. Carter recalled thatit 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 outDylath-Leen, crossing the fields to Nir and the Skai and following the river to its mouth. Thisthey at once resolved to do, and lost no time in loping off, since the thickening of the duskpromised 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 bestan unpleasant companion for man. After that Carter sought a forest pool and cleansed himselfof 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 ofthe phosphorescence one might travel as well as by day; wherefore Carter set out upon the well-knownroute toward Celephaîs, in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. And as he went he thoughtof the zebra he had left tethered to an ash tree on Ngranek in far-away Oriab so many aeonsago, and wondered if any lava-gatherer had fed and released it. And he wondered, too, if hewould ever return to Baharna and pay for the zebra that was slain by night in those ancientruins by Yath’s shore, and if the old tavern-keeper would remember him. Such were thethoughts 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 werein 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 awar on the cats was under debate in that sovereign assembly of zoogs. It all came from the lossof the party which had sneaked after Carter to Ulthar, and which the cats had justly punishedfor unsuitable intentions. The matter had long rankled; and now, or within at least 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 Ulthara proper chance to drill and mobilise. This was the plan of the zoogs, and Carter saw that hemust foil it before leaving on his mighty quest.

Very quietly therefore did Randolph Carter steal to the edge of the wood andsend the cry of the cat over the starlit fields. And a great grimalkin in a nearby cottage tookup 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 intoUlthar, and Ulthar’s numerous cats called in chorus and fell into a line of march. Itwas fortunate that the moon was not up, so that all the cats were on earth. Swiftly and silentlyleaping, they sprang from every hearth and housetop and poured in a great furry sea across theplains to the edge of the wood. Carter was there to greet them, and the sight of shapely, wholesomecats 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 thevery little kitten at the inn to whom Carter had given a saucer of rich cream on that long-vanishedmorning in Ulthar. He was a strapping and promising cat now, and purred as he shook hands withhis friend. His grandfather said he was doing very well in the army, and that he might wellexpect a captaincy after one more campaign.

Carter now outlined the peril of the cat tribe, and was rewarded by deep-throatedpurrs of gratitude from all sides. Consulting with the generals, he prepared a plan of instantaction which involved marching at once upon the zoog council and other known strongholds ofzoogs; forestalling their surprise attacks and forcing them to terms before the mobilisationof their army of invasion. Thereupon without a moment’s loss that great ocean of catsflooded the enchanted wood and surged around the council tree and the great stone circle. Flutteringsrose to panic pitch as the enemy saw the newcomers, and there was very little resistance amongthe furtive and curious brown zoogs. They saw that they were beaten in advance, and turned fromthoughts of vengeance to thoughts of present self-preservation.

Half the cats now seated themselves in a circular formation with the capturedzoogs in the centre, leaving open a lane down which were marched the additional captives roundedup by the other cats in other parts of the wood. Terms were discussed at length, Carter actingas interpreter, and it was decided that the zoogs might remain a free tribe on condition ofrendering to the cats a large annual tribute of grouse, quail, and pheasants from the less fabulousparts of their forest. Twelve young zoogs of noble families were taken as hostages to be keptin the Temple of the Cats at Ulthar, and the victors made it plain that any disappearances ofcats on the borders of the zoog domain would be followed by consequences highly disastrous tozoogs. These matters disposed of, the assembled cats broke ranks and permitted the zoogs toslink off one by one to their respective homes, which they hastened to do with many a sullenbackward glance.

The old cat general now offered Carter an escort through the forest to whateverborder he wished to reach, deeming it likely that the zoogs would harbour dire resentment againsthim 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 performanceof its duty, Randolph Carter walked with dignity through that enchanted and phosphorescent woodof titan trees, talking of his quest with the old general and his grandson whilst others ofthe band indulged in fantastic gambols or chased fallen leaves that the wind drove among thefungi of the primeval floor. And the old cat said that he had heard much of unknown Kadath inthe cold waste, but did not know where it was. As for the marvellous sunset city, he had noteven 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 Celephaîs, whither he wasbound. That old cat, already slightly known to Carter, was a dignified Maltese; and would provehighly influential in any transaction. It was dawn when they came to the proper edge of thewood, and Carter bade his friends a reluctant farewell. The young sub-lieutenant he had metas a small kitten would have followed him had not the old general forbidden it, but that austerepatriarch insisted that the path of duty lay with the tribe and the army. So Carter set outalone over the golden fields that stretched mysterious beside a willow-fringed river, and thecats went back into the wood.

Well did the traveller know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood andthe Cerenerian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukranos that marked his course.The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colours of thethousand flowers that starred each knoll and dingle. 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 thesummer’s humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faeryplace, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.

By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to theriver’s edge and bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes fromhis far realm on the twilight sea once a year in a golden palanquin to pray to the god of Oukranos,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 itsinner shrine where the river enters through hidden channels and the god sings softly in thenight. Many times the moon hears strange music as it shines on those courts and terraces andpinnacles, 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 has entered the temple or seen the priests.Now, in the drowsiness of day, that carven and delicate fane was silent, and Carter heard onlythe murmur of the great stream and the hum of the birds and bees as he walked onward under anenchanted sun.

All that afternoon the pilgrim wandered on through perfumed meadows and inthe lee of gentle riverward hills bearing peaceful thatched cottages and the shrines of amiablegods carven from jasper or chrysoberyl. Sometimes he walked close to the bank of Oukranos andwhistled to the sprightly and iridescent fish of that crystal stream, and at other times hepaused amidst the whispering rushes and gazed at the great dark wood on the farther side, whosetrees came down clear to the water’s edge. In former dreams he had seen quaint lumberingbuopoths come shyly out of that wood to drink, but now he could not glimpse any. Once in a whilehe paused to watch a carnivorous fish catch a fishing bird, which it lured to the water by shewingits tempting scales in the sun, and grasped by the beak with its enormous mouth as the wingedhunter sought to dart down upon it.

Toward evening he mounted a low grassy rise and saw before him flaming in thesunset the thousand gilded spires of Thran. Lofty beyond belief are the alabaster walls of thatincredible city, sloping inward toward the top and wrought in one solid piece by what meansno man knows, for they are more ancient than memory. Yet lofty as they are with their hundredgates 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, sometimesshining clear, sometimes caught at the top in tangles of cloud and mist, and sometimes cloudedlower down with their utmost pinnacles blazing free above the vapours. And where Thran’sgates open on the river are great wharves of marble, with ornate galleons of fragrant cedarand calamander riding gently at anchor, and strange bearded sailors sitting on casks and baleswith the hieroglyphs of far places. Landward beyond the walls lies the farm country, where smallwhite cottages dream between little hills, and narrow roads with many stone bridges wind gracefullyamong streams and gardens.

Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight floatup from the river to the marvellous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk hecame to the southern gate, and was stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three dreamsbeyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer worthy to walk up Thran’s steep mysteriousstreets and linger in bazaars where the wares of the ornate galleons were sold. Then into thatincredible city he walked; through a wall so thick that the gate was a tunnel, and thereafteramidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and narrow between the heavenward towers. Lightsshone through grated and balconied windows, and the sound of lutes and pipes stole timid frominner courts where marble fountains bubbled. Carter knew his way, and edged down through darkerstreets to the river, where at an old sea-tavern he found the captains and seamen he had knownin myriad other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celephaîs 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 Celephaîs, and satin the prow as the ropes were cast off and the long sail down to the Cerenerian Sea began. Formany leagues the banks were much as they were above Thran, with now and then a curious templerising on the farther hills toward the right, and a drowsy village on the shore, with steepred roofs and nets spread in the sun. Mindful of his search, Carter questioned all the marinersclosely about those whom they had met in the taverns of Celephaîs, asking the names andways of the strange men with long, narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin noses, and pointed chinswho came in dark ships from the north and traded onyx for the carved jade and spun gold andlittle red singing birds of Celephaîs. Of these men the sailors knew not much, save thatthey talked but seldom and spread a kind of awe about them.

Their land, very far away, was called Inganok, and not many people cared togo thither because it was a cold twilight land, and said to be close to unpleasant Leng; althoughhigh impassable mountains towered on the side where Leng was thought to lie, so that none mightsay whether this evil plateau with its horrible stone villages and unmentionable monastery werereally there, or whether the rumour were only a fear that timid people felt in the night whenthose formidable barrier peaks loomed black against a rising moon. Certainly, men reached Lengfrom very different oceans. Of other boundaries of Inganok those sailors had no notion, norhad they heard of the cold waste and unknown Kadath save from vague unplaced report. And ofthe marvellous sunset city which Carter sought they knew nothing at all. So the traveller askedno more of far things, but bided his time till he might talk with those strange men from coldand twilight Inganok 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 traversethe perfumed jungles of Kled. Here Carter wished he might disembark, for in those tropic tanglessleep wondrous palaces of ivory, lone and unbroken, where once dwelt fabulous monarchs of aland 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 glimpsedthem from afar by moonlight, though none dares approach them closely because of the guardiansto 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 junglefell far behind, leaving only its fragrance as a memory that it had been. And all through thenight that galleon floated on past mysteries unseen and unsuspected. Once a lookout reportedfires on the hills to the east, but the sleepy captain said they had better not be looked attoo 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 housesalong 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 plasteredgables. 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 tradedin the taverns. Carter also went ashore, and looked curiously upon the rutted streets wherewooden 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 salt with the spray of high tides,and seemed exceedingly ancient with their low black-beamed ceilings and casem*nts of greenishbull’s-eye panes. Ancient sailors in those taverns talked much of distant ports, and toldmany stories of the curious men from twilight Inganok, but had little to add to what the seamenof the galleon had told. Then, at last, after much unloading and loading, the ship set sailonce more over the sunset sea, and the high walls and gables of Hlanith grew less as the lastgolden 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, sightingno land and speaking but one other vessel. Then near sunset of the second day there loomed upahead the snowy peak of Aran with its gingko-trees swaying on the lower slopes, and Carter knewthat they were come to the land of Ooth-Nargai and the marvellous city of Celephaîs. Swiftlythere came into sight the glittering minarets of that fabulous town, and the untarnished marblewalls with their bronze statues, and the great stone bridge where Naraxa joins the sea. Thenrose the green gentle hills behind the town, with their groves and gardens of asphodels andthe small shrines and cottages upon them; and far in the background the purple ridge of theTanarians, potent and mystical, behind which lay forbidden ways into the waking world and towardother regions of dream.

The harbour was full of painted galleys, some of which were from the marblecloud-city of Serannian, that lies in ethereal space beyond where the sea meets the sky, andsome of which were from more substantial ports on the oceans of dreamland. Among these the steersmanthreaded his way up to the spice-fragrant wharves, where the galleon made fast in the dusk asthe city’s million lights began to twinkle out over the water. Ever new seemed this deathlesscity of vision, for here time has no power to tarnish or destroy. As it has always been is stillthe turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, and the eighty orchid-wreathed priests are the same who buildedit ten thousand years ago. Shining still is the bronze of the great gates, nor are the onyxpavements ever worn or broken. And the great bronze statues on the walls look down on merchantsand camel drivers older than fable, yet without one grey hair in their forked beards.

Carter did not at once seek out the temple or the palace or the citadel, butstayed by the seaward wall among traders and sailors. And when it was too late for rumours andlegends he sought out an ancient tavern he knew well, and rested with dreams of the gods onunknown Kadath whom he sought. The next day he searched all along the quays for some of thestrange mariners of Inganok, but was told that none were now in port, their galley not beingdue from the north for full two weeks. He found, however, one Thorabonian sailor who had beento Inganok and had worked in the onyx quarries of that twilight place; and this sailor saidthere was certainly a desert to the north of the peopled region, which everybody seemed to fearand shun. The Thorabonian opined that this desert led around the utmost rim of impassable peaksinto Leng’s horrible plateau, and that this was why men feared it; though he admittedthere were other vague tales of evil presences and nameless sentinels. Whether or not this couldbe the fabled waste wherein unknown Kadath stands he did not know; but it seemed unlikely thatthose presences and sentinels, if indeed they truly existed, were stationed for naught.

On the following day Carter walked up the Street of the Pillars to the turquoisetemple and talked with the high-priest. Though Nath-Horthath is chiefly worshipped in Celephaîs,all the Great Ones are mentioned in diurnal prayers; and the priest was reasonably versed intheir moods. Like Atal in distant Ulthar, he strongly advised against any attempt to see them;declaring that they are testy and capricious, and subject to strange protection from the mindlessOther Gods from Outside, whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Theirjealous hiding of the marvellous sunset city shewed clearly that they did not wish Carter toreach it, and it was doubtful how they would regard a guest whose object was to see them andplead before them. No man had ever found Kadath in the past, and it might be just as well ifnone ever found it in the future. Such rumours as were told about that onyx castle of the GreatOnes were not by any means reassuring.

Having thanked the orchid-crowned high-priest, Carter left the temple and soughtthe bazaar of the sheep-butchers, where the old chief of Celephaîs’ cats dwelt sleekand contented. That grey and dignified being was sunning himself on the onyx pavement, and extendeda languid paw as his caller approached. But when Carter repeated the passwords and introductionsfurnished 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 ofall, he repeated several things told him furtively by the timid waterfront cats of Celephaîsabout the men of Inganok, on whose dark ships no cat will go.

It seems that these men have an aura not of earth about them, though that isnot the reason why no cat will sail on their ships. The reason for this is that Inganok holdsshadows which no cat can endure, so that in all that cold twilight realm there is never a cheeringpurr or a homely mew. Whether it be because of things wafted over the impassable peaks fromhypothetical 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 spacewhich cats do not like, and to which they are more sensitive than men. Therefore they will notgo on the dark ships that seek the basalt quays of Inganok.

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 theSeventy Delights at Celephaîs and in the turreted cloud-castle of sky-floating Serannian.It seems that he could no more find content in those places, but had formed a mighty longingfor the English cliffs and downlands of his boyhood; where in little dreaming villages England’sold songs hover at evening behind lattice windows, and where grey church towers peep lovelythrough the verdure of distant valleys. He could not go back to these things in the waking worldbecause his body was dead; but he had done the next best thing and dreamed a small tract ofsuch countryside in the region east of the city, where meadows roll gracefully up from the sea-cliffsto the foot of the Tanarian Hills. There he dwelt in a grey Gothic manor-house of stone lookingon the sea, and tried to think it was ancient Trevor Towers, where he was born and where thirteengenerations of his forefathers had first seen the light. And on the coast nearby he had builta little Cornish fishing village with steep cobbled ways, settling therein such people as hadthe most English faces, and seeking ever to teach them the dear remembered accents of old Cornwallfishers. And in a valley not far off he had reared a great Norman Abbey whose tower he couldsee from his window, placing around it in the churchyard grey stones with the names of his ancestorscarved thereon, and with a moss somewhat like Old England’s moss. For though Kuranes wasa monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and marvels, splendours and beauties,ecstacies and delights, novelties and excitements at his command, he would gladly have resignedforever the whole of his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a simple boy inthat pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded his being and ofwhich he must always be immutably a part.

So when Carter bade that old grey chief of the cats adieu, he did not seekthe terraced palace of rose-crystal but walked out the eastern gate and across the daisied fieldstoward 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 rangthe bell there hobbled to admit him no robed and anointed lackey of the palace, but a smallstubbly old man in a smock who spoke as best he could in the quaint tones of far Cornwall. AndCarter walked up the shady path between trees as near as possible to England’s trees,and climbed the terraces among gardens set out as in Queen Anne’s time. At the door, flankedby stone cats in the old way, he was met by a whiskered butler in suitable livery; and was presentlytaken to the library where Kuranes, Lord of Ooth-Nargai and the Sky around Serannian, sat pensivein a chair by the window looking on his little sea-coast village and wishing that his old nursewould 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 inhis youth, rose eagerly to meet his guest; for the sight of an Anglo-Saxon from the waking worldwas 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 andwell versed in the wonders of incredible places. Kuranes, indeed, had been out beyond the starsin the ultimate void, and was said to be the only one who had ever returned sane from such avoyage.

At length Carter brought up the subject of his quest, and asked of his hostthose questions he had asked of so many others. Kuranes did not know where Kadath was, or themarvellous sunset city; but he did know that the Great Ones were very dangerous creatures toseek 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 whereform does not exist, and coloured gases study the innermost secrets. The violet gas S’ngachad told him terrible things of the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, and had warned him never toapproach 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 tothe marvellous sunset city, it were better not to seek that city.

Kuranes furthermore doubted whether his guest would profit aught by comingto the city even were he to gain it. He himself had dreamed and yearned long years for lovelyCelephaîs and the land of Ooth-Nargai, and for the freedom and colour and high experienceof life devoid of its chains, conventions, and stupidities. But now that he was come into thatcity and that land, and was the king thereof, he found the freedom and the vividness all toosoon 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 familiarthings of England that had shaped his youth. All his kingdom would he give for the sound ofCornish church bells over the downs, and all the thousand minarets of Celephaîs for thesteep homely roofs of the village near his home. So he told his guest that the unknown sunsetcity might not hold quite the content he sought, and that perhaps it had better remain a gloriousand half-remembered dream. For he had visited Carter often in the old waking days, and knewwell the lovely New England slopes that had given him birth.

At the last, he was very certain, the seeker would long only for the earlyremembered scenes; the glow of Beacon Hill at evening, the tall steeples and winding hill streetsof quaint Kingsport, the hoary gambrel roofs of ancient and witch-haunted Arkham, and the blessedmiles of meads and valleys where stone walls rambled and white farmhouse gables peeped out frombowers 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 bronzegate into Celephaîs and down the Street of the Pillars to the old sea-wall, where he talkedmore with the mariners of far parts and waited for the dark ship from cold and twilight Inganok,whose strange-faced sailors and onyx-traders had in them the blood of the Great Ones.

One starlight evening when the Pharos shone splendid over the harbour the longed-forship put in, and strange-faced sailors and traders appeared one by one and group by group inthe ancient taverns along the sea-wall. It was very exciting to see again those living facesso like the godlike features on Ngranek, but Carter did not hasten to speak with the silentseamen. He did not know how much of pride and secrecy and dim supernal memory might fill thosechildren of the Great Ones, and was sure it would not be wise to tell them of his quest or asktoo closely of that cold desert stretching north of their twilight land. They talked littlewith the other folk in those ancient sea-taverns; but would gather in groups in remote cornersand sing among themselves the haunting airs of unknown places, or chant long tales to one anotherin 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 wordscame to common ears only as strange cadence and obscure melody.

For a week the strange seamen lingered in the taverns and traded in the bazaarsof Celephaîs, and before they sailed Carter had taken passage on their dark ship, tellingthem that he was an old onyx-miner and wishful to work in their quarries. That ship was verylovely and cunningly wrought, being of teakwood with ebony fittings and traceries of gold, andthe cabin in which the traveller lodged had hangings of silk and velvet. One morning at theturn of the tide the sails were raised and the anchor lifted, and as Carter stood on the highstern he saw the sunrise-blazing walls and bronze statues and golden minarets of ageless Celephaîssink into the distance, and the snowy peak of Mount Aran grow smaller and smaller. By noon therewas nothing in sight save the gentle blue of the Cerenerian Sea, with one painted galley afaroff bound for that cloud-hung realm of Serannian where the sea meets the sky.

And 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 songsof unknown places, and then stole off one by one to the forecastle while the wistful watchersmurmured old chants and leaned over the rail to glimpse the luminous fish playing in bowersbeneath 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 dayhe made progress in knowing the men of the ship, getting them little by little to talk of theircold twilight land, of their exquisite onyx city, and of their fear of the high and impassablepeaks beyond which Leng was said to be. They told him how sorry they were that no cats wouldstay in the land of Inganok, and how they thought the hidden nearness of Leng was to blame forit. Only of the stony desert to the north they would not talk. There was something disquietingabout 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 goingto work. There were many of them, for all the city of Inganok was builded of onyx, whilst greatpolished blocks of it were traded in Rinar, Ogrothan, and Celephaîs, and at home with themerchants of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron, for the beautiful wares of those fabulous ports.And far to the north, almost in that cold desert whose existence the men of Inganok did notcare to admit, there was an unused quarry greater than all the rest; from which had been hewnin forgotten times such prodigious lumps and blocks that the sight of their chiselled vacanciesstruck terror to all who beheld. Who had mined those incredible blocks, and whither they hadbeen transported, no man might say; but it was thought best not to trouble that quarry, aroundwhich 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 heardof 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 overheadgrew thicker and thicker. And in two weeks there was not any sunlight at all, but only a weirdgrey twilight shining through a dome of eternal cloud by day, and a cold starless phosphorescencefrom the under side of that cloud by night. On the twentieth day a great jagged rock in thesea was sighted from afar, the first land glimpsed since Aran’s snowy peak had dwindledbehind the ship. Carter asked the captain the name of that rock, but was told that it had noname 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, thetraveller was glad that no stop had been made, and that the rock had no name. The seamen prayedand chanted till the noise was out of earshot, and Carter dreamed terrible dreams within dreamsin the small hours.

Two mornings after that there loomed far ahead and to the east a line of greatgrey peaks whose tops were lost in the changeless clouds of that twilight world. And at thesight of them the sailors sang glad songs, and some knelt down on the deck to pray; so thatCarter knew they were come to the land of Inganok and would soon be moored to the basalt quaysof the great town bearing that land’s name. Toward noon a dark coast-line appeared, andbefore three o’clock there stood out against the north the bulbous domes and fantasticspires 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-windowedwere the houses, and carved on every side with flowers and patterns whose dark symmetries dazzledthe eye with a beauty more poignant than light. Some ended in swelling domes that tapered toa point, others in terraced pyramids whereon rose clustered minarets displaying every phaseof strangeness and imagination. The walls were low, and pierced by frequent gates, each undera great arch rising high above the general level and capped by the head of a god chiselled withthat same skill displayed in the monstrous face on distant Ngranek. On a hill in the centrerose a sixteen-angled tower greater than all the rest and bearing a high pinnacled belfry restingon a flattened dome. This, the seamen said, was the Temple of the Elder Ones, and was ruledby an old high-priest sad with inner secrets.

At intervals the clang of a strange bell shivered over the onyx city, answeredeach time by a peal of mystic music made up of horns, viols, and chanting voices. And from arow of tripods on a gallery round the high dome of the temple there burst flares of flame atcertain 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 thePnakotic Manuscripts. As the ship rode past the great basalt breakwater into the harbour thelesser noises of the city grew manifest, and Carter saw the slaves, sailors, and merchants onthe docks. The sailors and merchants were of the strange-faced race of the gods, but the slaveswere squat, slant-eyed folk said by rumour to have drifted somehow across or around the impassablepeaks from valleys beyond Leng. The wharves reached wide outside the city wall and bore uponthem all manner of merchandise from the galleys anchored there, while at one end were greatpiles of onyx both carved and uncarved awaiting shipment to the far markets of Rinar, Ogrothan,and Celephaîs.

It was not yet evening when the dark ship anchored beside a jutting quay ofstone, 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 whilstothers were crooked and narrow. The houses near the water were lower than the rest, and boreabove their curiously arched doorways certain signs of gold said to be in honour of the respectivesmall gods that favoured each. The captain of the ship took Carter to an old sea-tavern whereflocked the mariners of quaint countries, and promised that he would next day shew him the wondersof the twilight city, and lead him to the taverns of the onyx-miners by the northern wall. Andevening fell, and little bronze lamps were lighted, and the sailors in that tavern sang songsof remote places. But when from its high tower the great bell shivered over the city, and thepeal of the horns and viols and voices rose cryptical in answer thereto, all ceased their songsor tales and bowed silent till the last echo died away. For there is a wonder and a strangenesson the twilight city of Inganok, and men fear to be lax in its rites lest a doom and a vengeancelurk 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 thetaverns of Dylath-Leen, who was reputed to trade with the horrible stone villages of Leng whichno healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from afar, and even to have dealtwith that high-priest not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face anddwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery. This man had seemed to shew a queer gleamof knowing when Carter asked the traders of Dylath-Leen about the cold waste and Kadath; andsomehow his presence in dark and haunted Inganok, so close to the wonders of the north, wasnot a reassuring thing. He slipped wholly out of sight before Carter could speak to him, andsailors 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 dexterousjade goblets that merchants brought from Ilarnek.

On the following morning the ship-captain led Carter through the onyx streetsof Inganok, dark under their twilight sky. The inlaid doors and figured house-fronts, carvenbalconies and crystal-paned oriels, all gleamed with a sombre and polished loveliness; and nowand then a plaza would open out with black pillars, colonnades, and the statues of curious beingsboth human and fabulous. Some of the vistas down long and unbending streets, or through sidealleys and over bulbous domes, spires, and arabesqued roofs, were weird and beautiful beyondwords; and nothing was more splendid than the massive height of the great central Temple ofthe 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 beyondthe city walls and the leagues of pasture land, rose the gaunt grey sides of those topless andimpassable peaks across which hideous Leng was said to lie.

The captain took Carter to the mighty temple, which is set with its walledgarden in a great round plaza whence the streets go as spokes from a wheel’s hub. Theseven arched gates of that garden, each having over it a carven face like those on the city’sgates, are always open; and the people roam reverently at will down the tiled paths and throughthe little lanes lined with grotesque termini and the shrines of modest gods. And there arefountains, pools, and basins there to reflect the frequent blaze of the tripods on the highbalcony, all of onyx and having in them small luminous fish taken by divers from the lower bowersof ocean. When the deep clang from the temple’s belfry shivers over the garden and thecity, and the answer of the horns and viols and voices peals out from the seven lodges by thegarden gates, there issue from the seven doors of the temple long columns of masked and hoodedpriests in black, bearing at arm’s length before them great golden bowls from which acurious steam rises. And all the seven columns strut peculiarly in single file, legs thrown farforward without bending the knees, down the walks that lead to the seven lodges, wherein theydisappear and do not appear again. It is said that subterrene paths connect the lodges withthe temple, and that the long files of priests return through them; nor is it unwhispered thatdeep flights of onyx steps go down to mysteries that are never told. But only a few are thosewho hint that the priests in the masked and hooded columns are not human priests.

Carter did not enter the temple, because none but the Veiled King is permittedto do that. But before he left the garden the hour of the bell came, and he heard the shiveringclang deafeningly above him, and the wailing of the horns and viols and voices loud from thelodges by the gates. And down the seven great walks stalked the long files of bowl-bearing priestsin 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 pavementover which the bowls had passed. Even the ship-captain did not like that spot, and hurried himon 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 that broad curvingone where the king and his companions ride on yaks or in yak-drawn chariots. Carter and hisguide climbed up an alley that was all steps, between inlaid walls bearing strange signs ingold, and under balconies and oriels whence sometimes floated soft strains of music or breathsof exotic fragrance. Always ahead loomed those titan walls, mighty buttresses, and clusteredand bulbous domes for which the Veiled King’s palace is famous; and at length they passedunder a great black arch and emerged in the gardens of the monarch’s pleasure. There Carterpaused in faintness at so much of beauty; for the onyx terraces and colonnaded walks, the gayparterres and delicate flowering trees espaliered to golden lattices, the brazen urns and tripodswith cunning bas-reliefs, the pedestalled and almost breathing statues of veined black marble,the basalt-bottomed lagoons and tiled fountains with luminous fish, the tiny temples of iridescentsinging birds atop carven columns, the marvellous scrollwork of the great bronze gates, andthe blossoming vines trained along every inch of the polished walls all joined to form a sightwhose loveliness was beyond reality, and half-fabulous even in the land of dream. There it shimmeredlike a vision under that grey twilight sky, with the domed and fretted magnificence of the palaceahead, and the fantastic silhouette of the distant impassable peaks on the right. And ever thesmall birds and the fountains sang, while the perfume of rare blossoms spread like a veil overthat incredible garden. No other human presence was there, and Carter was glad it was so. Thenthey turned and descended again the onyx alley of steps, for the palace itself no visitor mayenter; and it is not well to look too long and steadily at the great central dome, since itis said to house the archaic father of all the rumoured shantak-birds, and to send out queerdreams to the curious.

After that the captain took Carter to the north quarter of the town, near theGate 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 whilstCarter was eager to talk with miners about the north. There were many men in that inn, and thetraveller was not long in speaking to some of them; saying that he was an old miner of onyx,and anxious to know somewhat of Inganok’s quarries. But all that he learnt was not muchmore than he knew before, for the miners were timid and evasive about the cold desert to thenorth and the quarry that no man visits. They had fears of fabled emissaries from around themountains where Leng is said to lie, and of evil presences and nameless sentinels far northamong the scattered rocks. And they whispered also that the rumoured shantak-birds are no wholesomethings; it being indeed for the best that no man has ever truly seen one (for that fabled fatherof 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 forhimself and to visit the scattered farms and quaint onyx villages of Inganok, Carter hired ayak and stuffed great leathern saddle-bags for a journey. Beyond the Gate of the Caravans theroad lay straight betwixt tilled fields, with many odd farmhouses crowned by low domes. At someof 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 feltcertain he had come at last upon one of the Great Ones themselves, or upon one with full nine-tenthsof their blood, dwelling amongst men. And to that austere and reticent cotter he was carefulto 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 towhich he tied his yak, and in the morning resumed his northward pilgrimage. At about ten o’clockhe reached the small-domed village of Urg, where traders rest and miners tell their tales, andpaused 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 withmore rocks than tilled fields. And by evening the low hills on his left had risen into sizeableblack cliffs, so that he knew he was close to the mining country. All the while the great gauntsides of the impassable mountains towered afar off at his right, and the farther he went, theworse tales he heard of them from the scattered farmers and traders and drivers of lumberingonyx-carts along the way.

On the second night he camped in the shadow of a large black crag, tetheringhis yak to a stake driven in the ground. He observed the greater phosphorescence of the cloudsat this 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 whothere laboured with picks and chisels. Before evening he had passed eleven quarries; the landbeing here given over altogether to onyx cliffs and boulders, with no vegetation at all, butonly great rocky fragments scattered about a floor of black earth, with the grey impassablepeaks always rising gaunt and sinister on his right. The third night he spent in a camp of quarrymen whose flickering fires cast weird reflections on the polished cliffs to the west. And theysang many songs and told many tales, shewing such strange knowledge of the olden days and thehabits of gods that Carter could see they held many latent memories of their sires the GreatOnes. They asked him whither he went, and cautioned him not to go too far to the north; buthe replied that he was seeking new cliffs of onyx, and would take no more risks than were commonamong prospectors. In the morning he bade them adieu and rode on into the darkening north, wherethey had warned him he would find the feared and unvisited quarry whence hands older than men’shands had wrenched prodigious blocks. But he did not like it when, turning back to wave a lastfarewell, he thought he saw approaching the camp that squat and evasive old merchant with slantingeyes, whose conjectured traffick with Leng was the gossip of distant Dylath-Leen.

After two more quarries the inhabited part of Inganok seemed to end, and theroad narrowed to a steeply rising yak-path among forbidding black cliffs. Always on the righttowered the gaunt and distant peaks, and as Carter climbed farther and farther into this untraversedrealm he found it grew darker and colder. Soon he perceived that there were no prints of feetor hooves on the black path beneath, and realised that he was indeed come into strange and desertedways of elder time. Once in a while a raven would croak far overhead, and now and then a flappingbehind some vast rock would make him think uncomfortably of the rumoured shantak-bird. But inthe main he was alone with his shaggy steed, and it troubled him to observe that this excellentyak become more and more reluctant to advance, and more and more disposed to snort affrightedlyat any small noise along the route.

The path now contracted between sable and glistening walls, and began to displayan even greater steepness than before. It was a bad footing, and the yak often slipped on thestony fragments strown thickly about. In two hours Carter saw ahead a definite crest, beyondwhich 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 andled his dubious yak; pulling very hard when the animal balked or stumbled, and keeping his ownfooting as best he might. Then suddenly he came to the top and saw beyond, and gasped at whathe saw.

The path indeed led straight ahead and slightly down, with the same lines ofhigh natural walls as before; but on the left hand there opened out a monstrous space, vastacres in extent, where some archaic power had riven and rent the native cliffs of onyx in theform of a giants’ 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 theblocks once hewn by nameless hands and chisels. High over its jagged rim huge ravens flappedand croaked, and vague whirrings in the unseen depths told of bats or urhags or less mentionablepresences haunting the endless blackness. There Carter stood in the narrow way amidst the twilightwith the rocky path sloping down before him; tall onyx cliffs on his right that led on as faras he could see, and tall cliffs on the left chopped off just ahead to make that terrible andunearthly quarry.

All at once the yak uttered a cry and burst from his control, leaping pasthim and darting on in a panic till it vanished down the narrow slope toward the north. Stoneskicked by its flying hooves fell over the brink of the quarry and lost themselves in the darkwithout any sound of striking bottom; but Carter ignored the perils of that scanty path as heraced breathlessly after the flying steed. Soon the left-hand cliffs resumed their course, makingthe way once more a narrow lane; and still the traveller leaped on after the yak whose greatwide prints told of its desperate flight.

Once he thought he heard the hoofbeats of the frightened beast, and doubledhis speed from this encouragement. He was covering miles, and little by little the way was broadeningin front till he knew he must soon emerge on the cold and dreaded desert to the north. The gauntgrey flanks of the distant impassable peaks were again visible above the right-hand crags, andahead were the rocks and boulders of an open space which was clearly a foretaste of the darkand 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 notthe frightened hoofbeats of his fleeing yak. These beats were ruthless and purposeful, and theywere 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 couldbe nothing wholesome or mentionable. His yak must have heard or felt it first, and he did notlike to ask himself whether it had followed him from the haunts of men or had floundered upout of that black quarry pit. Meanwhile the cliffs had been left behind, so that the oncomingnight fell over a great waste of sand and spectral rocks wherein all paths were lost. He couldnot 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 waslosing ground seemed unhappily clear to him, and he knew he was hopelessly lost in this brokenand blasted desert of meaningless rocks and untravelled sands. Only those remote and impassablepeaks on the right gave him any sense of direction, and even they were less clear as the greytwilight waned and the sickly phosphorescence of the clouds took its place.

Then dim and misty in the darkling north before him he glimpsed a terriblething. He had thought it for some moments a range of black mountains, but now he saw it wassomething more. The phosphorescence of the brooding clouds shewed it plainly, and even silhouettedparts of it as low vapours glowed behind. How distant it was he could not tell, but it musthave been very far. It was thousands of feet high, stretching in a great concave arc from thegrey impassable peaks to the unimagined westward spaces, and had once indeed been a ridge ofmighty onyx hills. But now those hills were hills no more, for some hand greater than man’shad touched them. Silent they squatted there atop the world like wolves or ghouls, crowned withclouds and mists and guarding the secrets of the north forever. All in a great half circle theysquatted, those dog-like mountains carven into monstrous watching statues, and their right handswere raised in menace against mankind.

It was only the flickering light of the clouds that made their mitred doubleheads seem to move, but as Carter stumbled on he saw arise from their shadowy laps great formswhose motions were no delusion. Winged and whirring, those forms grew larger each moment, andthe traveller knew his stumbling was at an end. They were not any birds or bats known elsewhereon 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 evilguardians and nameless sentinels made men avoid the boreal rock desert. And as he stopped infinal resignation he dared at last to look behind him; where indeed was trotting the squat slant-eyedtrader of evil legend, grinning astride a lean yak and leading on a noxious horde of leeringshantaks to whose wings still clung the rime and nitre of the nether pits.

Trapped though he was by fabulous and hippocephalic winged nightmares thatpressed around in great unholy circles, Randolph Carter did not lose consciousness. Lofty andhorrible those titan gargoyles towered above him, while the slant-eyed merchant leaped downfrom his yak and stood grinning before the captive. Then the man motioned Carter to mount oneof the repugnant shantaks, helping him up as his judgment struggled with his loathing. It washard work ascending, for the shantak-bird has scales instead of feathers, and those scales arevery slippery. Once he was seated, the slant-eyed man hopped up behind him, leaving the leanyak to be led away northward toward the ring of carven mountains by one of the incredible birdcolossi.

There now followed a hideous whirl through frigid space, endlessly up and eastwardtoward the gaunt grey flanks of those impassable mountains beyond which Leng was said to lie.Far above the clouds they flew, till at last there lay beneath them those fabled summits whichthe folk of Inganok 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 strangecaves which made him think of those on Ngranek; but he did not question his captor about thesethings when he noticed that both the man and the horse-headed shantak appeared oddly fearfulof 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 barrenplain whereon at great distances shone little feeble fires. As they descended there appearedat intervals lone huts of granite and bleak stone villages whose tiny windows glowed with pallidlight. And there came from those huts and villages a shrill droning of pipes and a nauseousrattle of crotala which proved at once that Inganok’s people are right in their geographickrumours. For travellers have heard such sounds before, and know that they float only from thecold desert plateau which healthy folk never visit; that haunted place of evil and mystery whichis Leng.

Around the feeble fires dark forms were dancing, and Carter was curious asto what manner of beings they might be; for no healthy folk have ever been to Leng, and theplace is known only by its fires and stone huts as seen from afar. Very slowly and awkwardlydid those forms leap, and with an insane twisting and bending not good to behold; so that Carterdid not wonder at the monstrous evil imputed to them by vague legend, or the fear in which alldreamland holds their abhorrent frozen plateau. As the shantak flew lower, the repulsivenessof the dancers became tinged with a certain hellish familiarity; and the prisoner kept straininghis 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 asort of wig or headpiece with small horns. Of other clothing they had none, but most of themwere quite furry. Behind they had dwarfish tails, and when they glanced upward he saw the excessivewidth of their mouths. Then he knew what they were, and that they did not wear any wigs or headpiecesafter all. For the cryptic folk of Leng were of one race with the uncomfortable merchants ofthe black galleys that traded rubies at Dylath-Leen; those not quite human merchants who arethe slaves of the monstrous moon-things! They were indeed the same dark folk who had shanghaiedCarter on their noisome galley so long ago, and whose kith he had seen driven in herds aboutthe unclean wharves of that accursed lunar city, with the leaner ones toiling and the fatterones taken away in crates for other needs of their polypous and amorphous masters. Now he sawwhere such ambiguous creatures came from, and shuddered at the thought that Leng must be knownto these formless abominations from the moon.

But the shantak flew on past the fires and the stone huts and the less thanhuman dancers, and soared over sterile hills of grey granite and dim wastes of rock and iceand snow. Day came, and the phosphorescence of low clouds gave place to the misty twilight ofthat 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 theshantak would answer with tittering tones that rasped like the scratching of ground glass. Allthis while the land was getting higher, and finally they came to a windswept table-land whichseemed the very roof of a blasted and tenantless world. There, all alone in the hush and thedusk and the cold, rose the uncouth stones of a squat windowless building, around which a circleof crude monoliths stood. In all this arrangement there was nothing human, and Carter surmisedfrom old tales that he was indeed come to that most dreadful and legendary of all places, theremote 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 crawlingchaos Nyarlathotep.

The loathsome bird now settled to the ground, and the slant-eyed man hoppeddown 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 beforehis masters a mortal whose presumption had aimed at the finding of unknown Kadath and the sayingof a prayer before the faces of the Great Ones in their onyx castle. It seemed likely that thismerchant had caused his former capture by the slaves of the moon-things in Dylath-Leen, andthat he now meant to do what the rescuing cats had baffled; taking the victim to some dreadrendezvous with monstrous Nyarlathotep and telling with what boldness the seeking of unknownKadath had been tried. Leng and the cold waste north of Inganok 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 tosee he was obeyed; so Carter followed where he led, and passed within the circle of standingrocks and into the low arched doorway of that windowless stone monastery. There were no lightsinside, but the evil merchant lit a small clay lamp bearing morbid bas-reliefs and prodded hisprisoner on through mazes of narrow winding corridors. On the walls of the corridors were paintedfrightful 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 hideousLeng keep alive many primal things. Carter saw them fleetingly in the rays of that dim and movinglamp, 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 scenesof old wars, wherein Leng’s almost-humans fought with the bloated purple spiders of theneighbouring 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 thathopped and floundered and wriggled out of them. Those slippery greyish-white blasphemies theyworshipped as gods, nor ever complained when scores of their best and fatted males were takenaway in the black galleys. The monstrous moon-beasts made their camp on a jagged isle in thesea, and Carter could tell from the frescoes that this was none other than the lone namelessrock he had seen when sailing to Inganok; that grey accursed rock which Inganok’s seamenshun, 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 andcarven places. Great gardens and columned streets led from the cliffs and from each of the sixsphinx-crowned gates to a vast central plaza, and in that plaza was a pair of winged colossallions guarding the top of a subterrene staircase. Again and again were those huge winged lionsshewn, their mighty flanks of diorite glistening in the grey twilight of the day and the cloudyphosphorescence of the night. And as Carter stumbled past their frequent and repeated picturesit came to him at last what indeed they were, and what city it was that the almost-humans hadruled so anciently before the coming of the black galleys. There could be no mistake, for thelegends of dreamland are generous and profuse. Indubitably that primal city was no less a placethan storied Sarkomand, whose ruins had bleached for a million years before the first true humansaw the light, and whose twin titan lions guard eternally the steps that lead down from dreamlandto the Great Abyss.

Other views shewed the gaunt grey peaks dividing Leng from Inganok, and themonstrous shantak-birds that build nests on the ledges half way up. And they shewed likewisethe curious caves near the very topmost pinnacles, and how even the boldest of the shantaksfly screaming away from them. Carter had seen those caves when he passed over them, and hadnoticed their likeness to the caves on Ngranek. Now he knew that the likeness was more thana 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. Hehad met those silent, flitting, and clutching creatures before; those mindless guardians ofthe Great Abyss whom even the Great Ones fear, and who own not Nyarlathotep but hoary Nodensas their lord. For they were the dreaded night-gaunts, who never laugh or smile because theyhave no faces, and who flop unendingly in the dark betwixt the Vale of Pnath and the passesto the outer world.

The slant-eyed merchant had now prodded Carter into a great domed space whosewalls were carved in shocking bas-reliefs, and whose centre held a gaping circular pit surroundedby six malignly stained stone altars in a ring. There was no light in this vast and evil-smellingcrypt, and the small lamp of the sinister merchant shone so feebly that one could grasp detailsonly little by little. At the farther end was a high stone dais reached by five steps; and thereon a golden throne sat a lumpish figure robed in yellow silk figured with red and having a yellowsilken 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-coveredpaws and blowing certain loathsome sounds from beneath its flowing yellow mask. This colloquywent on for some time, and to Carter there was something sickeningly familiar in the sound ofthat flute and the stench of the malodorous place. It made him think of a frightful red-littencity and of the revolting procession that once filed through it; of that, and of an awful climbthrough lunar countryside beyond, before the rescuing rush of earth’s friendly cats. Heknew that the creature on the dais was without doubt the high-priest not to be described, ofwhich legend whispers such fiendish and abnormal possibilities, but he feared to think justwhat 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 drovehim to something his reason would never have dared to attempt, for in all his shaken consciousnessthere 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, andthat even on that table-land the noxious shantak still waited; yet in spite of all this therewas in his mind only the instant need to get away from that wriggling, silk-robed monstrosity.

The slant-eyed man had set his curious lamp upon one of the high and wickedlystained altar-stones by the pit, and had moved forward somewhat to talk to the high-priest withhis hands. Carter, hitherto wholly passive, now gave that man a terrific push with all the wildstrength of fear, so that the victim toppled at once into that gaping well which rumour holdsto reach down to the hellish Vaults of Zin where gugs hunt ghasts in the dark. In almost thesame second he seized the lamp from the altar and darted out into the frescoed labyrinths, racingthis way and that as chance determined and trying not to think of the stealthy padding of shapelesspaws on the stones behind him, or of the silent wrigglings and crawlings which must be goingon back there in lightless corridors.

After a few moments he regretted his thoughtless haste, and wished he had triedto follow backward the frescoes he had passed on the way in. True, they were so confused andduplicated that they could not have done him much good, but he wished none the less he had madethe attempt. Those he now saw were even more horrible than those he had seen then, and he knewhe 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 perilbeset him. His lamp was waning, and he would soon be in pitch blackness with no means of sightor guidance.

When the light was all gone he groped slowly in the dark, and prayed to theGreat Ones for such help as they might afford. At times he felt the stone floor sloping up ordown, and once he stumbled over a step for which no reason seemed to exist. The farther he wentthe damper it seemed to be, and when he was able to feel a junction or the mouth of a side passagehe always chose the way which sloped downward the least. He believed, though, that his generalcourse was down; and the vault-like smell and incrustations on the greasy walls and floor alikewarned him he was burrowing deep in Leng’s unwholesome table-land. But there was not anywarning of the thing which came at last; only the thing itself with its terror and shock andbreath-taking chaos. One moment he was groping slowly over the slippery floor of an almost levelplace, and the next he was shooting dizzily downward in the dark through a burrow which musthave been well-nigh vertical.

Of the length of that hideous sliding he could never be sure, but it seemedto take hours of delirious nausea and ecstatic frenzy. Then he realised he was still, with thephosphorescent clouds of a northern night shining sickly above him. All around were crumblingwalls and broken columns, and the pavement on which he lay was pierced by straggling grass andwrenched 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 entranceto the inner blacknesses out of which he had come. Ahead stretched double rows of pillars, andthe fragments and pedestals of pillars, that spoke of a broad and bygone street; and from theurns and basins along the way he knew it had been a great street of gardens. Far off at itsend the pillars spread to mark a vast round plaza, and in that open circle there loomed giganticunder the lurid night clouds a pair of monstrous things. Huge winged lions of diorite they were,with blackness and shadow between them. Full twenty feet they reared their grotesque and unbrokenheads, and snarled derisive on the ruins around them. And Carter knew right well what they mustbe, for legend tells of only one such twain. They were the changeless guardians of the GreatAbyss, and these dark ruins were in truth primordial Sarkomand.

Carter’s first act was to close and barricade the archway in the cliffwith fallen blocks and odd debris that lay around. He wished no follower from Leng’s hatefulmonastery, for along the way ahead would lurk enough of other dangers. Of how to get from Sarkomandto the peopled parts of dreamland he knew nothing at all; nor could he gain much by descendingto the grottoes of the ghouls, since he knew they were no better informed than he. The threeghouls which had helped him through the city of gugs to the outer world had not known how toreach Sarkomand in their journey back, but had planned to ask old traders in Dylath-Leen. Hedid not like to think of going again to the subterrene world of gugs and risking once more thathellish tower of Koth with its Cyclopean steps leading to the enchanted wood, yet he felt hemight have to try this course if all else failed. Over Leng’s plateau past the lone monasteryhe dared not go unaided; for the high-priest’s emissaries must be many, while at the journey’send there would no doubt be the shantaks and perhaps other things to deal with. If he couldget a boat he might sail back to Inganok past the jagged and hideous rock in the sea, for theprimal frescoes in the monastery labyrinth had shewn that this frightful place lies not farfrom Sarkomand’s basalt quays. But to find a boat in this aeon-deserted city was no probablething, and it did not appear likely that he could ever make one.

Such were the thoughts of Randolph Carter when a new impression began beatingupon his mind. All this while there had stretched before him the great corpse-like width offabled Sarkomand with its black broken pillars and crumbling sphinx-crowned gates and titanstones and monstrous winged lions against the sickly glow of those luminous night clouds. Nowhe saw far ahead and on the right a glow that no clouds could account for, and knew he was notalone in the silence of that dead city. The glow rose and fell fitfully, flickering with a greenishtinge which did not reassure the watcher. And when he crept closer, down the littered streetand through some narrow gaps between tumbled walls, he perceived that it was a campfire nearthe wharves with many vague forms clustered darkly around it, and a lethal odour hanging heavilyover 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 blackgalleys from the moon.

Then, just as he was about to creep back from that detestable flame, he sawa stirring among the vague dark forms and heard a peculiar and unmistakable sound. It was thefrightened 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 hisfear, and crept forward again instead of retreating. Once in crossing an open street he wriggledworm-like on his stomach, and in another place he had to rise to his feet to avoid making anoise among heaps of fallen marble. But always he succeeded in avoiding discovery, so that ina short time he had found a spot behind a titan pillar whence he could watch the whole green-littenscene of action. There, around a hideous fire fed by the obnoxious stems of lunar fungi, theresquatted a stinking circle of the toad-like moon-beasts and their almost-human slaves. Someof these slaves were heating curious iron spears in the leaping flames, and at intervals applyingtheir white-hot points to three tightly trussed prisoners that lay writhing before the leadersof the party. From the motions of their tentacles Carter could see that the blunt-snouted moon-beastswere enjoying the spectacle hugely, and vast was his horror when he suddenly recognised thefrantic meeping and knew that the tortured ghouls were none other than the faithful trio whichhad guided him safely from the abyss and had thereafter set out from the enchanted wood to findSarkomand and the gate to their native deeps.

The number of malodorous moon-beasts 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 hadbeen captured he could not guess; but fancied that the grey toad-like blasphemies had heardthem inquire in Dylath-Leen concerning the way to Sarkomand and had not wished them to approachso closely the hateful plateau of Leng and the high-priest not to be described. For a momenthe 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 atonce to the gulf, where assuredly he would meet no horrors worse than those above, and wherehe might soon find ghouls eager to rescue their brethren and perhaps to wipe out the moon-beastsfrom the black galley. It occurred to him that the portal, like other gates to the abyss, mightbe guarded by flocks of night-gaunts; but he did not fear these faceless creatures now. He hadlearned that they are bound by solemn treaties with the ghouls, and the ghoul which was Pickmanhad taught him how to glibber a password they understood.

So Carter began another silent crawl through the ruins, edging slowly towardthe great central plaza and the winged lions. It was ticklish work, but the moon-beasts werepleasantly busy and did not hear the slight noises which he twice made by accident among thescattered stones. At last he reached the open space and picked his way among the stunted treesand briers that had grown up therein. The gigantic lions loomed terrible above him in the sicklyglow of the phosphorescent night clouds, but he manfully persisted toward them and presentlycrept round to their faces, knowing it was on that side he would find the mighty darkness whichthey guard. Ten feet apart crouched the mocking-faced beasts of diorite, brooding on Cyclopeanpedestals whose sides were chiselled into fearsome bas-reliefs. Betwixt them was a tiled courtwith a central space which had once been railed with balusters of onyx. Midway in this spacea black well opened, and Carter soon saw that he had indeed reached the yawning gulf whose crustedand mouldy stone steps lead down to the crypts of nightmare.

Terrible is the memory of that dark descent, in which hours wore themselvesaway whilst Carter wound sightlessly round and round down a fathomless spiral of steep and slipperystairs. So worn and narrow were the steps, and so greasy with the ooze of inner earth, thatthe climber never quite knew when to expect a breathless fall and hurtling down to the ultimatepits; and he was likewise uncertain just when or how the guardian night-gaunts would suddenlypounce upon him, if indeed there were any stationed in this primeval passage. All about himwas a stifling odour of nether gulfs, and he felt that the air of these choking depths was notmade for mankind. In time he became very numb and somnolent, moving more from automatic impulsethan from reasoned will; nor did he realise any change when he stopped moving altogether assomething quietly seized him from behind. He was flying very rapidly through the air beforea 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 thewind 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 morecomfortable position. Thus encouraged, Carter ventured some explanations; telling of the seizureand torture of three ghouls by the moon-beasts, and of the need of assembling a party to rescuethem. The night-gaunts, though inarticulate, seemed to understand what was said; and shewedgreater haste and purpose in their flight. Suddenly the dense blackness gave place to the greytwilight of inner earth, and there opened up ahead one of those flat sterile plains on whichghouls love to squat and gnaw. Scattered tombstones and osseous fragments told of the denizensof that place; and as Carter gave a loud meep of urgent summons, a score of burrows emptiedforth their leathery, dog-like tenants. The night-gaunts now flew low and set their passengerupon his feet, afterward withdrawing a little and forming a hunched semicircle on the groundwhile 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 andgather such troops as might be available for the rescue. After a long wait a ghoul of some importanceappeared, and made significant signs to the night-gaunts, causing two of the latter to fly offinto the dark. Thereafter there were constant accessions to the hunched flock of night-gauntson the plain, till at length the slimy soil was fairly black with them. Meanwhile fresh ghoulscrawled out of the burrows one by one, all glibbering excitedly and forming in crude battlearray not far from the huddled night-gaunts. In time there appeared that proud and influentialghoul which was once the artist Richard Pickman of Boston, and to him Carter glibbered a veryfull account of what had occurred. The erstwhile Pickman, surprised to greet his ancient friendagain, seemed very much impressed, and held a conference with other chiefs a little apart fromthe growing throng.

Finally, after scanning the ranks with care, the assembled chiefs all meepedin unison and began glibbering orders to the crowds of ghouls and night-gaunts. A large detachmentof the horned flyers vanished at once, while the rest grouped themselves two by two on theirknees with extended fore legs, awaiting the approach of the ghouls one by one. As each ghoulreached the pair of night-gaunts to which he was assigned, he was taken up and borne away intothe blackness; till at last the whole throng had vanished save for Carter, Pickman, and theother chiefs, and a few pairs of night-gaunts. Pickman explained that night-gaunts are the advanceguard and battle steeds of the ghouls, and that the army was issuing forth to Sarkomand to dealwith the moon-beasts. Then Carter and the ghoulish chiefs approached the waiting bearers andwere 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 lions and the spectral ruins of primal Sarkomand.

When, after a great interval, Carter saw again the sickly light of Sarkomand’snocturnal 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 enemywould be needed. The greenish flare near the wharves still glimmered faintly, though the absenceof ghoulish meeping shewed that the torture of the prisoners was over for the nonce. Softlyglibbering directions to their steeds, and to the flock of riderless night-gaunts ahead, theghouls presently rose in wide whirring columns and swept on over the bleak ruins toward theevil flame. Carter was now beside Pickman in the front rank of ghouls, and saw as they approachedthe noisome camp that the moon-beasts were totally unprepared. The three prisoners lay boundand inert beside the fire, while their toad-like captors slumped drowsily about in no certainorder. The almost-human slaves were asleep, even the sentinels shirking a duty which in thisrealm must have seemed to them merely perfunctory.

The final swoop of the night-gaunts and mounted ghouls was very sudden, eachof the greyish toad-like blasphemies and their almost-human slaves being seized by a group ofnight-gaunts before a sound was made. The moon-beasts, of course, were voiceless; and even theslaves had little chance to scream before rubbery paws choked them into silence. Horrible werethe writhings of those great jellyish abnormalities as the sardonic night-gaunts clutched them,but nothing availed against the strength of those black prehensile talons. When a moon-beastwrithed too violently, a night-gaunt would seize and pull its quivering pink tentacles; whichseemed to hurt so much that the victim would cease its struggles. Carter expected to see muchslaughter, but found that the ghouls were far subtler in their plans. They glibbered certainsimple orders to the night-gaunts which held the captives, trusting the rest to instinct; andsoon the hapless creatures were borne silently away into the Great Abyss, to be distributedimpartially amongst the bholes, gugs, ghasts, and other dwellers in darkness whose modes ofnourishment are not painless to their chosen victims. Meanwhile the three bound ghouls had beenreleased and consoled by their conquering kinsfolk, whilst various parties searched the neighbourhoodfor possible remaining moon-beasts, and boarded the evil-smelling black galley at the wharfto make sure that nothing had escaped the general defeat. Surely enough, the capture had beenthorough; for not a sign of further life could the victors detect. Carter, anxious to preservea means of access to the rest of dreamland, urged them not to sink the anchored galley; andthis request was freely granted out of gratitude for his act in reporting the plight of thecaptured trio. On the ship were found some very curious objects and decorations, some of whichCarter cast at once into the sea.

Ghouls and night-gaunts now formed themselves in separate groups, the formerquestioning their rescued fellows anent past happenings. It appeared that the three had followedCarter’s directions and proceeded from the enchanted wood to Dylath-Leen by way of Nirand the Skai, stealing human clothes at a lonely farmhouse and loping as closely as possiblein the fashion of a man’s walk. In Dylath-Leen’s taverns their grotesque ways andfaces had aroused much comment; but they had persisted in asking the way to Sarkomand untilat last an old traveller was able to tell them. Then they knew that only a ship for Lelag-Lengwould serve their purpose, and prepared to wait patiently for such a vessel.

But evil spies had doubtless reported much; for shortly a black galley putinto 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 oncefound himself. This time, however, the unseen rowers steered not for the moon but for antiqueSarkomand; 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 Inganok’s mariners shun,and the ghouls had there seen for the first time the real masters of the ship; being sickeneddespite their own callousness by such extremes of malign shapelessness and fearsome odour. There,too, were witnessed the nameless pastimes of the toad-like resident garrison—such pastimesas give rise to the night-howlings which men fear. After that had come the landing at ruinedSarkomand and the beginning of the tortures, whose continuance the present rescue had prevented.

Future plans were next discussed, the three rescued ghouls suggesting a raidon the jagged rock and the extermination of the toad-like garrison there. To this, however,the night-gaunts objected; since the prospect of flying over water did not please them. Mostof the ghouls favoured the design, but were at a loss how to follow it without the help of thewinged 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 filedinto the noisome ship and took their seats on the rowers’ benches. Carter found them fairlyapt 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 sailat last; Pickman and the other chiefs gathering on deck and discussing modes of approach andprocedure.

On the very first night the howlings from the rock were heard. Such was theirtimbre that all the galley’s crew shook visibly; but most of all trembled the three rescuedghouls who knew precisely what those howlings meant. It was not thought best to attempt an attackby night, so the ship lay to under the phosphorescent clouds to wait for the dawn of a greyishday. When the light was ample and the howlings still the rowers resumed their strokes, and thegalley drew closer and closer to that jagged rock whose granite pinnacles clawed fantasticallyat the dull sky. The sides of the rock were very steep; but on ledges here and there could beseen the bulging walls of queer windowless dwellings, and the low railings guarding travelledhigh roads. No ship of men had ever come so near the place, or at least, had never come so nearand departed again; but Carter and the ghouls were void of fear and kept inflexibly on, roundingthe eastern face of the rock and seeking the wharves which the rescued trio described as beingon the southern side within a harbour formed of steep headlands.

The headlands were prolongations of the island proper, and came so closelytogether that only one ship at a time might pass between them. There seemed to be no watcherson the outside, so the galley was steered boldly through the flume-like strait and into thestagnant foetid harbour beyond. Here, however, all was bustle and activity; with several shipslying at anchor along a forbidding stone quay, and scores of almost-human slaves and moon-beastsby the waterfront handling crates and boxes or driving nameless and fabulous horrors hitchedto lumbering lorries. There was a small stone town hewn out of the vertical cliff above thewharves, with the start of a winding road that spiralled out of sight toward higher ledges ofthe rock. Of what lay inside that prodigious peak of granite none might say, but the thingsone 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, realise that the black ship had changed hands; for ghouls look muchlike 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 soonas the wharf was touched, and then to sail directly away, leaving matters wholly to the instinctsof those almost mindless creatures. Marooned on the rock, the horned flyers would first of allseize whatever living things they found there, and afterward, quite helpless to think exceptin terms of the homing instinct, would forget their fear of water and fly swiftly back to theabyss; bearing their noisome prey to appropriate destinations in the dark, from which not muchwould emerge alive.

The ghoul that was Pickman now went below and gave the night-gaunts their simpleinstructions, while the ship drew very near to the ominous and malodorous wharves. Presentlya fresh stir rose along the waterfront, and Carter saw that the motions of the galley had begunto excite suspicion. Evidently the steersman was not making for the right dock, and probablythe watchers had noticed the difference between the hideous ghouls and the almost-human slaveswhose places they were taking. Some silent alarm must have been given, for almost at once ahorde of the mephitic moon-beasts began to pour from the little black doorways of the windowlesshouses and down the winding road at the right. A rain of curious javelins struck the galleyas the prow hit the wharf, felling two ghouls and slightly wounding another; but at this pointall the hatches were thrown open to emit a black cloud of whirring night-gaunts which swarmedover the town like a flock of horned and Cyclopean bats.

The jellyish moon-beasts had procured a great pole and were trying to pushoff the invading ship, but when the night-gaunts struck them they thought of such things nomore. 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 andup the winding roadway to the reaches above. Sometimes a group of the black flutterers woulddrop a toad-like prisoner from aloft by mistake, and the manner in which the victim would burstwas highly offensive to the sight and smell. When the last of the night-gaunts had left thegalley the ghoulish leaders glibbered an order of withdrawal, and the rowers pulled quietlyout of the harbour between the grey headlands while still the town was a chaos of battle andconquest.

The Pickman ghoul allowed several hours for the night-gaunts to make up theirrudimentary minds and overcome their fear of flying over the sea, and kept the galley standingabout 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, andall 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 topmost pinnacle, andshortly 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 thinning swarm into the sea; but Carter didnot worry, since he knew from observation that the toad-like moon-beasts cannot swim. At length,when the ghouls were satisfied that all the night-gaunts had left for Sarkomand and the GreatAbyss 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 towersand eyries and fortresses chiselled from the solid stone.

Frightful were the secrets uncovered in those evil and windowless crypts; forthe remnants of unfinished pastimes were many, and in various stages of departure from theirprimal state. Carter put out of the way certain things which were after a fashion alive, andfled precipitately from a few other things about which he could not be very positive. The stench-filledhouses were furnished mostly with grotesque stools and benches carven from moon-trees, and werepainted inside with nameless and frantic designs. Countless weapons, implements, and ornamentslay about; including some large idols of solid ruby depicting singular beings not found on theearth. 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 spearsand javelins he collected, and with Pickman’s approval distributed among the ghouls. Suchdevices were new to the dog-like lopers, but their relative simplicity made them easy to masterafter a few concise hints.

The upper parts of the rock held more temples than private homes, and in numeroushewn chambers were found terrible carven altars and doubtfully stained fonts and shrines forthe worship of things more monstrous than the mild gods atop Kadath. From the rear of one greattemple stretched a low black passage which Carter followed far into the rock with a torch tillhe came to a lightless domed hall of vast proportions, whose vaultings were covered with daemoniaccarvings and in whose centre yawned a foul and bottomless well like that in the hideous monasteryof 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; butfor some reason he felt an unaccountable dread of opening it or even approaching it, and hastenedback through the cavern to his unlovely allies as they shambled about with an ease and abandonhe could scarcely feel. The ghouls had observed the unfinished pastimes of the moon-beasts,and had profited in their fashion. They had also found a hogshead of potent moon-wine, and wererolling it down to the wharves for removal and later use in diplomatic dealings, though therescued trio, remembering its effect on them in Dylath-Leen, had warned their company to tastenone of it. Of rubies from lunar mines there was a great store, both rough and polished, inone of the vaults near the water; but when the ghouls found they were not good to eat they lostall interest in them. Carter did not try to carry any away, since he knew too much about thosewhich had mined them.

Suddenly there came an excited meeping from the sentries on the wharves, andall 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 could be but amoment before the almost-humans on deck would perceive the invasion of the town and give thealarm to the monstrous things below. Fortunately the ghouls still bore the spears and javelinswhich Carter had distributed amongst them; and at his command, sustained by the being that wasPickman, they now formed a line of battle and prepared to prevent the landing of the ship. Presentlya burst of excitement on the galley told of the crew’s discovery of the changed stateof things, and the instant stoppage of the vessel proved that the superior numbers of the ghoulshad been noted and taken into account. After a moment of hesitation the newcomers silently turnedand passed out between the headlands again, but not for an instant did the ghouls imagine thatthe conflict was averted. Either the dark ship would seek reinforcements, or the crew wouldtry to land elsewhere on the island; hence a party of scouts was at once sent up toward thepinnacle to see what the enemy’s course would be.

In a very few minutes a ghoul returned breathless to say that the moon-beastsand 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. Almostimmediately afterward the galley was sighted again through the flume-like strait, but only fora second. Then, a few moments later, a second messenger panted down from aloft to say that anotherparty was landing on the other headland; both being much more numerous than the size of thegalley would seem to allow for. The ship itself, moving slowly with only one sparsely mannedtier of oars, soon hove in sight betwixt the cliffs, and lay to in the foetid harbour as ifto 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 atonce scrambled up the rocks in their respective directions, while the third was subdivided intoa land party and a sea party. The sea party, commanded by Carter, boarded the anchored galleyand rowed out to meet the undermanned galley of the newcomers; whereat the latter retreatedthrough the strait to the open sea. Carter did not at once pursue it, for he knew he might beneeded more acutely near the town.

Meanwhile the frightful detachments of the moon-beasts and almost-humans hadlumbered up to the top of the headlands and were shockingly silhouetted on either side againstthe grey twilight sky. The thin hellish flutes of the invaders had now begun to whine, and thegeneral effect of those hybrid, half-amorphous processions was as nauseating as the actual odourgiven off by the toad-like lunar blasphemies. Then the two parties of the ghouls swarmed intosight and joined the silhouetted panorama. Javelins began to fly from both sides, and the swellingmeeps of the ghouls and the bestial howls of the almost-humans gradually joined the hellishwhine of the flutes to form a frantick and indescribable chaos of daemon cacophony. Now andthen bodies fell from the narrow ridges of the headlands into the sea outside or the harbourinside, in the latter case being sucked quickly under by certain submarine lurkers whose presencewas indicated only by prodigious bubbles.

For half an hour this dual battle raged in the sky, till upon the west cliffthe invaders were completely annihilated. On the east cliff, however, where the leader of themoon-beast party appeared to be present, the ghouls had not fared so well; and were slowly retreatingto the slopes of the pinnacle proper. Pickman had quickly ordered reinforcements for this frontfrom 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 aidof their hard-pressed fellows; turning the tide and forcing the invaders back again along thenarrow ridge of the headland. The almost-humans were by this time all slain, but the last ofthe toad-like horrors fought desperately with the great spears clutched in their powerful anddisgusting paws. The time for javelins was now nearly past, and the fight became a hand-to-handcontest of what few spearmen could meet upon that narrow ridge.

As fury and recklessness increased, the number falling into the sea becamevery great. Those striking the harbour met nameless extinction from the unseen bubblers, butof those striking the open sea some were able to swim to the foot of the cliffs and land ontidal rocks, while the hovering galley of the enemy rescued several moon-beasts. The cliffswere unscalable except where the monsters had debarked, so that none of the ghouls on the rockscould rejoin their battle-line. Some were killed by javelins from the hostile galley or fromthe moon-beasts above, but a few survived to be rescued. When the security of the land partiesseemed assured, Carter’s galley sallied forth between the headlands and drove the hostileship far out to sea; pausing to rescue such ghouls as were on the rocks or still swimming inthe ocean. Several moon-beasts washed on rocks or reefs were speedily put out of the way.

Finally, the moon-beasts’ galley being safely in the distance and theinvading land army concentrated in one place, Carter landed a considerable force on the easternheadland in the enemy’s rear; after which the fight was short-lived indeed. Attacked fromboth sides, the noisome flounderers were rapidly cut to pieces or pushed into the sea, tillby 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 evacuatedbefore 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 withcare, finding that over a fourth had been lost in the day’s battles. The wounded wereplaced on bunks in the galley, for Pickman always discouraged the old ghoulish custom of killingand eating one’s own wounded, and the able-bodied troops were assigned to the oars orto such other places as they might most usefully fill. Under the low phosphorescent clouds ofnight the galley sailed, and Carter was not sorry to be departing from that island of unwholesomesecrets, whose lightless domed hall with its bottomless well and repellent bronze door lingeredrestlessly 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 thebroken columns and crumbling sphinxes of that fearful city which lived and died before the yearsof man.

The ghouls made camp amongst the fallen stones of Sarkomand, despatching amessenger for enough night-gaunts to serve them as steeds. Pickman and the other chiefs wereeffusive in their gratitude for the aid Carter had lent them; and Carter now began to feel thathis plans were indeed maturing well, and that he would be able to command the help of thesefearsome allies not only in quitting this part of dreamland, but in pursuing his ultimate questfor the gods atop unknown Kadath, and the marvellous sunset city they so strangely withheldfrom his slumbers. Accordingly he spoke of these things to the ghoulish leaders; telling whathe knew of the cold waste wherein Kadath stands and of the monstrous shantaks and the mountainscarven 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 thegaunt grey peaks that divide Inganok from hateful Leng. He spoke, too, of the things he hadlearnt concerning night-gaunts from the frescoes in the windowless monastery of the high-priestnot to be described; how even the Great Ones fear them, and how their ruler is not the crawlingchaos Nyarlathotep at all, but hoary and immemorial Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss.

All these things Carter glibbered to the assembled ghouls, and presently outlinedthat request which he had in mind, and which he did not think extravagant considering the serviceshe had so lately rendered the rubbery, dog-like lopers. He wished very much, he said, for theservices of enough night-gaunts to bear him safely through the air past the realm of shantaksand carven mountains, and up into the cold 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 theGreat Ones for the sunset city they denied him, and felt sure that the night-gaunts could takehim thither without trouble; high above the perils of the plain, and over the hideous doubleheads of those carven sentinel mountains that squat eternally in the grey dusk. For the hornedand faceless creatures there could be no danger from aught of earth, since the Great Ones themselvesdread them. And even were unexpected things to come from the Other Gods, who are prone to overseethe affairs of earth’s milder gods, the night-gaunts need not fear; for the outer hellsare indifferent matters to such silent and slippery flyers as own not Nyarlathotep for theirmaster, but bow only to potent and archaic Nodens.

A flock of ten or fifteen night-gaunts, Carter glibbered, would surely be enoughto keep any combination of shantaks at a distance; though perhaps it might be well to have someghouls in the party to manage the creatures, their ways being better known to their ghoulishallies than to men. The party could land him at some convenient point within whatever wallsthat fabulous onyx citadel might have, waiting in the shadows for his return or his signal whilsthe ventured inside the castle to give prayer to the gods of earth. If any ghouls chose to escorthim into the throne-room of the Great Ones, he would be thankful, for their presence would addweight and importance to his plea. He would not, however, insist upon this but merely wishedtransportation to and from the castle atop unknown Kadath; the final journey being either tothe marvellous sunset city itself, in case the gods proved favourable, or back to the earthwardGate of Deeper Slumber in the enchanted wood in case his prayers were fruitless.

Whilst Carter was speaking all the ghouls listened with great attention, andas the moments advanced the sky became black with clouds of those night-gaunts for which messengershad been sent. The winged horrors settled in a semicircle around the ghoulish army, waitingrespectfully as the dog-like chieftains considered the wish of the earthly traveller. The ghoulthat was Pickman glibbered gravely with its fellows, and in the end Carter was offered far morethan he had at most expected. As he had aided the ghouls in their conquest of the moon-beasts,so would they aid him in his daring voyage to realms whence none had ever returned; lendinghim not merely a few of their allied night-gaunts, but their entire army as they encamped, veteranfighting ghouls and newly assembled night-gaunts alike, save only a small garrison for the capturedblack galley and such spoils as had come from the jagged rock in the sea. They would set outthrough the air whenever he might wish, and once arrived on Kadath a suitable train of ghoulswould attend him in state as he placed his petition before earth’s gods in their onyxcastle.

Moved by a gratitude and satisfaction beyond words, Carter made plans withthe ghoulish leaders for his audacious voyage. The army would fly high, they decided, over hideousLeng with its nameless monastery and wicked stone villages; stopping only at the vast grey peaksto 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 theirfinal course; approaching unknown Kadath either through the desert of carven mountains northof Inganok, or through the more northerly reaches of repulsive Leng itself. Dog-like and soullessas they are, the ghouls and night-gaunts had no dread of what those untrodden deserts mightreveal; nor did they feel any deterring awe at the thought of Kadath towering lone with itsonyx castle of mystery.

About midday the ghouls and night-gaunts prepared for flight, each ghoul selectinga suitable pair of horned steeds to bear him. Carter was placed well up toward the head of thecolumn beside Pickman, and in front of the whole a double line of riderless night-gaunts wasprovided as a vanguard. At a brisk meep from Pickman the whole shocking army rose in a nightmarecloud 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-landof Leng’s outskirts laid open to sight. Still higher flew the black host, till even thistable-land grew small beneath them; and as they worked northward over the windswept plateauof horror Carter saw once again with a shudder the circle of crude monoliths and the squat windowlessbuilding which he knew held that frightful silken-masked blasphemy from whose clutches he hadso narrowly escaped. This time no descent was made as the army swept bat-like over the sterilelandscape, passing the feeble fires of the unwholesome stone villages at a great altitude, andpausing not at all to mark the morbid twistings of the hooved, horned almost-humans that danceand pipe eternally therein. Once they saw a shantak-bird flying low over the plain, but whenit 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 Inganok,and hovered about those strange caves near the summits which Carter recalled as so frightfulto the shantaks. At the insistent meeping of the ghoulish leaders there issued forth from eachlofty burrow a stream of horned black flyers; with which the ghouls and night-gaunts ofthe party conferred at length by means of ugly gestures. It soon became clear that the bestcourse would be that over the cold waste north of Inganok, for Leng’s northward reachesare full of unseen pitfalls that even the night-gaunts dislike; abysmal influences centringin certain white hemispherical buildings on curious knolls, which common folklore associatesunpleasantly with the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

Of Kadath the flutterers of the peaks knew almost nothing, save that theremust be some mighty marvel toward the north, over which the shantaks and the carven mountainsstand guard. They hinted at rumoured abnormalities of proportion in those trackless leaguesbeyond, and recalled vague whispers of a realm where night broods eternally; but of definitedata they had nothing to give. So Carter and his party thanked them kindly; and, crossing thetopmost granite pinnacles to the skies of Inganok, dropped below the level of the phosphorescentnight clouds and beheld in the distance those terrible squatting gargoyles that were mountainstill some titan hand carved fright into their virgin rock.

There they squatted, in a hellish half-circle, their legs on the desert sandand their mitres piercing the luminous clouds; sinister, wolf-like, and double-headed, withfaces of fury and right hands raised, dully and malignly watching the rim of man’s worldand guarding with horror the reaches of a cold northern world that is not man’s. Fromtheir hideous laps rose evil shantaks of elephantine bulk, but these all fled with insane tittersas the vanguard of night-gaunts was sighted in the misty sky. Northward above those gargoylemountains the army flew, and over leagues of dim desert where never a landmark rose. Less andless luminous grew the clouds, till at length Carter could see only blackness around him; butnever did the winged steeds falter, bred as they were in earth’s blackest crypts, andseeing not with any eyes, but with the whole dank surface of their slippery forms. On and onthey 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 bewithin earth’s dreamland.

Then suddenly the clouds thinned and the stars shone spectrally above. Allbelow was still black, but those pallid beacons in the sky seemed alive with a meaning and directivenessthey 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 makeplain. Everything focussed toward the north; every curve and asterism of the glittering skybecame part of a vast design whose function was to hurry first the eye and then the whole observeronward to some secret and terrible goal of convergence beyond the frozen waste that stretched endlesslyahead. Carter looked toward the east where the great ridge of barrier peaks had towered alongall the length of Inganok, and saw against the stars a jagged silhouette which told of its continuedpresence. It was more broken now, with yawning clefts and fantastically erratic pinnacles; andCarter studied closely the suggestive turns and inclinations of that grotesque outline, whichseemed to share with the stars some subtle northward urge.

They were flying past at a tremendous speed, so that the watcher had to strainhard to catch details; when all at once he beheld just above the line of the topmost peaks adark and moving object against the stars, whose course exactly paralleled that of his own bizarreparty. 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 thanthat of the average specimen. Soon, however, he saw that this theory would not hold; for theshape of the thing above the mountains was not that of any hippocephalic bird. Its outline againstthe stars, necessarily vague as it was, resembled rather some huge mitred head or pair of headsinfinitely magnified; and its rapid bobbing flight through the sky seemed most peculiarly awingless one. Carter could not tell which side of the mountains it was on, but soon perceivedthat it had parts below the parts he had first seen, since it blotted out all the stars in placeswhere the ridge was deeply cleft.

Then came a wide gap in the range, where the hideous reaches of transmontaneLeng were joined to the cold waste on this side by a low pass through which the stars shonewanly. Carter watched this gap with intense care, knowing that he might see outlined againstthe 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 riftwhere it would presently appear in full-length silhouette. Gradually the huge thing above thepeaks neared the gap, slightly slackening its speed as if conscious of having outdistanced theghoulish army. For another minute suspense was keen, and then the brief instant of full silhouetteand revelation came; bringing to the lips of the ghouls an awed and half-choked meep of cosmicfear, and to the soul of the traveller a chill that has never wholly left it. For the mammothbobbing shape that overtopped the ridge was only a head—a mitred double head—andbelow it in terrible vastness loped the frightful swollen body that bore it; the mountain-highmonstrosity that walked in stealth and silence; the hyaena-like distortion of a giant anthropoidshape that trotted blackly against the sky, its repulsive pair of cone-capped heads reachinghalf 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 monstrousheads 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 southernstars, tiptoeing wolf-like and lumberingly, their tall mitres nodding thousands of feet in theair. The carven mountains, then, had not stayed squatting in that rigid semicircle north ofInganok with right hands uplifted. They had duties to perform, and were not remiss. But it washorrible 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 stillnor the carven and mitred mountains that walked. All was blackness beneath as the flutteringlegions surged northward amidst rushing winds and invisible laughter in the aether, and nevera shantak or less mentionable entity rose from the haunted wastes to pursue them. The fartherthey went, the faster they flew, till soon their dizzying speed seemed to pass that of a rifleball and approach that of a planet in its orbit. Carter wondered how with such speed the earthcould still stretch beneath them, but knew that in the land of dream dimensions have strangeproperties. That they were in a realm of eternal night he felt certain, and he fancied thatthe constellations overhead had subtly emphasised their northward focus; gathering themselvesup as it were to cast the flying army into the void of the boreal pole, as the folds of a bagare 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 flappingany more. The horned and faceless steeds had folded their membraneous appendages, and were restingquite passive in the chaos of wind that whirled and chuckled as it bore them on. A force notof earth had seized on the army, and ghouls and night-gaunts alike were powerless before a currentwhich pulled madly and relentlessly into the north whence no mortal had ever returned. At lengtha 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 somebeacon on a mountain, for only a mountain could rise so vast as seen from so prodigious a heightin the air.

Higher and higher rose the light and the blackness beneath it, till half thenorthern sky was obscured by the rugged conical mass. Lofty as the army was, that pale and sinisterbeacon rose above it, towering monstrous over all peaks and concernments of earth, and tastingthe atomless aether where the cryptical moon and the mad planets reel. No mountain known ofman was that which loomed before them. The high clouds far below were but a fringe for its foothills.The gasping dizziness of topmost air was but a girdle for its loins. Scornful and spectral climbedthat bridge betwixt earth and heaven, black in eternal night, and crowned with a pshent of unknownstars whose awful and significant outline grew every moment clearer. Ghouls meeped in wonderas they saw it, and Carter shivered in fear lest all the hurtling army be dashed to pieces onthe unyielding onyx of that Cyclopean cliff.

Higher and higher rose the light, till it mingled with the loftiest orbs ofthe zenith and winked down at the flyers with lurid mockery. All the north beneath it was blacknessnow; dread, stony blackness from infinite depths to infinite heights, with only that pale winkingbeacon 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 onthat titan mountain-top; horrible domed towers in noxious and incalculable tiers and clustersbeyond any dreamable workmanship of man; battlements and terraces of wonder and menace, alllimned tiny and black and distant against the starry pshent that glowed malevolently at theuppermost rim of sight. Capping that most measureless of mountains was a castle beyond all mortalthought, 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 thehelplessly wind-sucked party. They were rising abruptly now, and it was plain that the focusof their flight was the onyx castle where the pale light shone. So close was the great blackmountain that its sides sped by them dizzily as they shot upward, and in the darkness they coulddiscern nothing upon it. Vaster and vaster loomed the tenebrous towers of the nighted castleabove, and Carter could see that it was well-nigh blasphemous in its immensity. Well might itsstones have been quarried by nameless workmen in that horrible gulf rent out of the rock inthe hill pass north of Inganok, for such was its size that a man on its threshold stood evenas an ant on the steps of earth’s loftiest fortress. The pshent of unknown stars abovethe myriad domed turrets glowed with a sallow, sickly flare, so that a kind of twilight hungabout the murky walls of slippery onyx. The pallid beacon was now seen to be a single shiningwindow high up in one of the loftiest towers, and as the helpless army neared the top of themountain 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 therewas a glimpse of a great gate through which the voyagers were swept. All was night in the titancourtyard, and then came the deeper blackness of inmost things as a huge arched portal engulfedthe column. Vortices of cold wind surged dankly through sightless labyrinths of onyx, and Cartercould never tell what Cyclopean stairs and corridors lay silent along the route of his endlessaërial 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-gauntswas, it was lost in the prodigious voids of that more than earthly castle. And when at lastthere suddenly dawned around him the lurid light of that single tower room whose lofty windowhad served as a beacon, it took Carter long to discern the far walls and high, distant ceiling,and to realise 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 withpoise and dignity, flanked and followed by impressive lines of ghouls in ceremonial order, andoffering his prayer as a free and potent master among dreamers. He had known that the GreatOnes themselves are not beyond a mortal’s power to cope with, and had trusted to luckthat the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep would not happen to come to theiraid at the crucial moment, as they had so often done before when men sought out earth’sgods in their home or on their mountains. And with his hideous escort he had half hoped to defyeven the Other Gods if need were, knowing as he did that ghouls have no masters, and that night-gauntsown not Nyarlathotep but only archaick Nodens for their lord. But now he saw that supernal Kadathin its cold waste is indeed girt with dark wonders and nameless sentinels, and that the OtherGods are of a surety vigilant in guarding the mild, feeble gods of earth. Void as they are oflordship over ghouls and night-gaunts, the mindless, shapeless blasphemies of outer space canyet control them when they must; so that it was not in state as a free and potent master ofdreamers that Randolph Carter came into the Great Ones’ throne-room with his ghouls. Sweptand herded by nightmare tempests from the stars, and dogged by unseen horrors of the northernwaste, all that army floated captive and helpless in the lurid light, dropping numbly to theonyx floor when by some voiceless order the winds of fright dissolved.

Before no golden dais had Randolph Carter come, nor was there any august circleof crowned and haloed beings with narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin nose, and pointed chinwhose kinship to the carven face on Ngranek might stamp them as those to whom a dreamer mightpray. Save for that one tower room the onyx castle atop Kadath was dark, and the masters werenot 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 thatof all outdoors, and whose distant walls and roof were so nearly lost to sight in thin, curlingmists. Earth’s gods were not there, it was true, but of subtler and less visible presencesthere 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 orforms terror would next reveal itself, Carter could by no means imagine. He felt that his visithad been expected, and wondered how close a watch had all along been kept upon him by the crawlingchaos Nyarlathotep. It is Nyarlathotep, horror of infinite shapes and dread soul and messengerof the Other Gods, that the fungous moon-beasts serve; and Carter thought of the black galleythat had vanished when the tide of battle turned against the toad-like abnormalities on thejagged rock in the sea.

Reflecting upon these things, he was staggering to his feet in the midst ofhis nightmare company when there rang without warning through that pale-litten and limitlesschamber 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 hewas alone. Whither, why, and how the ghouls and night-gaunts had been snatched from sight wasnot for him to divine. He knew only that he was suddenly alone, and that whatever unseen powerslurked mockingly around him were no powers of earth’s friendly dreamland. Presently fromthe 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 grisly cohorts.In this low fanfare echoed all the wonder and melody of ethereal dream; exotic vistas of unimaginedloveliness floating from each strange chord and subtly alien cadence. Odours of incense cameto match the golden notes; and overhead a great light dawned, its colours changing in cyclesunknown to earth’s spectrum, and following the song of the trumpet in weird symphonicharmonies. Torches flared in the distance, and the beat of drums throbbed nearer amidst wavesof tense expectancy.

Out of the thinning mists and the cloud of strange incense filed twin columnsof giant black slaves with loin-cloths of iridescent silk. Upon their heads were strapped vasthelmet-like torches of glittering metal, from which the fragrance of obscure balsams spreadin fumous spirals. In their right hands were crystal wands whose tips were carven into leeringchimaeras, 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 chainthat held its wearer to a sober gait. That they were true black men of earth’s dreamlandwas at once apparent, but it seemed less likely that their rites and costumes were wholly thingsof our earth. Ten feet from Carter the columns stopped, and as they did so each trumpet flewabruptly to its bearer’s thick lips. Wild and ecstatic was the blast that followed, andwilder still the cry that chorused just after from dark throats somehow made shrill by strangeartifice.

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 crownedwith a golden pshent that glowed with inherent light. Close up to Carter strode that regal figure;whose proud carriage and swart features had in them the fascination of a dark god or fallenarchangel, and around whose eyes there lurked the languid sparkle of capricious humour. It spoke,and in its mellow tones there rippled the mild music of Lethean streams.

“Randolph Carter”, said the voice, “you have come to seethe Great Ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. Watchers have spoken of this thing, and theOther Gods have grunted as they rolled and tumbled mindlessly to the sound of thin flutes inthe black ultimate void where broods the daemon-sultan whose name no lips dare speak aloud.”

“When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kla to see the Great Ones danceand howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. The Other Gods were there, andthey 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 hisdue, nor have you failed ever in reverence toward the mild gods of earth. Yet have these godskept you from the marvellous sunset city of your dreams, and wholly through their own smallcovetousness; 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 marvellouscity. All through its palaces of veined marble they revel by day, and when the sun sets theygo out in the perfumed gardens and watch the golden glory on temples and colonnades, archedbridges and silver-basined fountains, and wide streets with blossom-laden urns and ivory statuesin gleaming rows. And when night comes they climb tall terraces in the dew, and sit on carvedbenches of porphyry scanning the stars, or lean over pale balustrades to gaze at the town’ssteep northward slopes, where one by one the little windows in old peaked gables shine softlyout with the calm yellow light of homely candles.”

“The gods love your marvellous city, and walk no more in the ways ofthe 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 holdsway on unremembered Kadath. Far away in a valley of your own childhood, Randolph Carter, playthe heedless Great Ones. You have dreamed too well, O wise arch-dreamer, for you have drawndream’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 phantomsthat have gone before.”

“It is not well that earth’s gods leave their thrones for the spiderto spin on, and their realm for the Others to sway in the dark manner of Others. Fain wouldthe powers from outside bring chaos and horror to you, Randolph Carter, who are the cause oftheir upsetting, but that they know it is by you alone that the gods may be sent back to theirworld. 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, backthrough 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 chargeyou to serve my will. I charge you to seek that sunset city which is yours, and to send thencethe drowsy truant gods for whom the dream-world waits. Not hard to find is that roseal feverof the gods, that fanfare of supernal trumpets and clash of immortal cymbals, that mystery whoseplace and meaning have haunted you through the halls of waking and the gulfs of dreaming, andtormented 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 stableand 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 tothe bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenesbrought to wide young eyes.”

“For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sumof what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs andwestern windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on thehill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charlesflows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you outin the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory andof love. And there is antique Salem with its brooding years, and spectral Marblehead scalingits rocky precipices into past centuries, and the glory of Salem’s towers and spires seenafar from Marblehead’s pastures across the harbour against the setting sun.”

“There is Providence, quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blueharbour, with terraces of green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, andNewport climbing wraith-like from its dreaming breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-growngambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it; and antediluvian Kingsport hoary withstacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables, and the marvel of high cliffs andthe milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.”

“Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lanes in Portsmouth, twilight bends ofrustic 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 steepledtowns and hills beyond hills along the North Shore, hushed stony slopes and low ivied cottagesin the lee of huge boulders in Rhode-Island’s back country. Scent of the sea and fragranceof the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens at dawn. These, RandolphCarter, are your city; for they are yourself. New-England bore you, and into your soul she poureda liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished byyears of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marbleparapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded stepsto the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughtsand visions of your wistful boyhood.”

“Look! through that window shine the stars of eternal night. Even nowthey are shining above the scenes you have known and cherished, drinking of their charm thatthey may shine more lovely over the gardens of dream. There is Antares—he is winking atthis moment over the roofs of Tremont Street, and you could see him from your window on BeaconHill. Out beyond those stars yawn the gulfs from whence my mindless masters have sent me. Someday you too may traverse them, but if you are wise you will beware such folly; for of thosemortals who have been and returned, only one preserves a mind unshattered by the pounding, clawinghorrors of the void. Terrors and blasphemies gnaw at one another for space, and there is moreevil in the lesser ones than in the greater; even as you know from the deeds of those who soughtto deliver you into my hands, whilst I myself harboured no wish to shatter you, and would indeedhave helped you hither long ago had I not been elsewhere busy, and certain that you would yourselffind 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 gentlyto those scenes which are of their own youth, and which wait uneasy for their return.”

“Easier even than the way of dim memory is the way I will prepare foryou. See! There comes hither a monstrous shantak, led by a slave who for your peace of mindhad best keep invisible. Mount and be ready—there! Yogash the black will help you on thescaly horror. Steer for that brightest star just south of the zenith—it is Vega, and intwo hours will be just above the terrace of your sunset city. Steer for it only till you heara far-off singing in the high aether. Higher than that lurks madness, so rein your shantak whenthe first note lures. Look then back to earth, and you will see shining the deathless altar-flameof 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 ofold you scanned the outspread glory, prodding the shantak till he cry aloud. That cry the GreatOnes will hear and know as they sit on their perfumed terraces, and there will come upon themsuch a homesickness that all of your city’s wonders will not console them for the absenceof 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 andtouch 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 lonely andunlighted, where of old they used to leap and revel in supernal radiance. And the shantak willtalk to them in the manner of shantaks, but it will have no powers of persuasion beyond therecalling of elder days.”

“Over and over must you speak to the wandering Great Ones of their homeand 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 afterthe loathly bird in the fashion of gods, through the deep gulfs of heaven to Kadath’sfamiliar towers and domes.”

“Then will the marvellous sunset city be yours to cherish and inhabitforever, and once more will earth’s gods rule the dreams of men from their accustomedseat. Go now—the casem*nt is open and the stars await outside. Already your shantak wheezesand 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 ululantmadness. Remember the Other Gods; they are great and mindless and terrible, and lurk in theouter voids. They are good gods to shun.”

“ Hei! Aa-shanta ’nygh! You are off! Send back earth’sgods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me inmy thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, theCrawling Chaos!“

And Randolph Carter, gasping and dizzy on his hideous shantak, shot screaminglyinto space toward the cold blue glare of boreal Vega; looking but once behind him at the clusteredand chaotic turrets of the onyx nightmare wherein still glowed the lone lurid light of thatwindow above the air and the clouds of earth’s dreamland. Great polypous horrors sliddarkly past, and unseen bat-wings beat multitudinous around him, but still he clung to the unwholesomemane of that loathly and hippocephalic scaled bird. The stars danced mockingly, almost shiftingnow and then to form pale signs of doom that one might wonder one had not seen and feared before;and ever the winds of aether howled of vague blackness and loneliness beyond the cosmos.

Then through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush of portent, and allthe winds and horrors slunk away as night things slink away before the dawn. Trembling in wavesthat 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, theshantak 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 oldwhen space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were born.

Faster flew the shantak, and lower bent the rider, drunk with the marvels ofstrange gulfs, and whirling in the crystal coils of outer magic. Then came too late the warningof the evil one, the sardonic caution of the daemon legate who had bidden the seeker bewarethe madness of that song. Only to taunt had Nyarlathotep marked out the way to safety and themarvellous sunset city; only to mock had that black messenger revealed the secret of those truantgods whose steps he could so easily lead back at will. For madness and the void’s wildvengeance are Nyarlathotep’s only gifts to the presumptuous; and frantick though the riderstrove to turn his disgusting steed, that leering, tittering shantak coursed on impetuous andrelentless, flapping its great slippery wings in malignant joy, and headed for those unhallowedpits whither no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion where bubblesand blasphemes at infinity’s centre the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name nolips dare speak aloud.

Unswerving and obedient to the foul legate’s orders, that hellish birdplunged onward through shoals of shapeless lurkers and caperers in darkness, and vacuous herdsof drifting entities that pawed and groped and groped and pawed; the nameless larvae of theOther Gods, that are like them blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers andthirsts.

Onward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously to watch the chucklingand hysterics into which the siren song of night and the spheres had turned, that eldritch scalymonster bore its helpless rider; hurtling and shooting, cleaving the uttermost rim and spanningthe outermost abysses; leaving behind the stars and the realms of matter, and darting meteor-likethrough stark formlessness toward those inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time whereinblack Azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drumsand the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes.

Onward—onward—through the screaming, cackling, and blackly populousgulfs—and then from some dim blessed distance there came an image and a thought to RandolphCarter the doomed. Too well had Nyarlathotep planned his mocking and his tantalising, for hehad brought up that which no gusts of icy terror could quite efface. Home—New England—BeaconHill—the waking world.

“For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sumof what you have seen and loved in youth . . . the glory of Boston’s hillside roofs andwestern windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on thehill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charlesflows drowsily . . . this loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memoryand dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet withcurious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the cityof broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visionsof your wistful boyhood.”

Onward—onward—dizzily onward to ultimate doom through the blacknesswhere sightless feelers pawed and slimy snouts jostled and nameless things tittered and titteredand tittered. But the image and the thought had come, and Randolph Carter knew clearly thathe was dreaming and only dreaming, and that somewhere in the background the world of wakingand the city of his infancy still lay. Words came again— “You need only turn backto the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.” Turn—turn—blacknesson every side, but Randolph Carter could turn.

Thick though the rushing nightmare that clutched his senses, Randolph Cartercould turn and move. He could move, and if he chose he could leap off the evil shantak thatbore him hurtlingly doomward at the orders of Nyarlathotep. He could leap off and dare thosedepths of night that yawned interminably down, those depths of fear whose terrors yet couldnot exceed the nameless doom that lurked waiting at chaos’ core. He could turn and moveand leap—he could—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 andwere born again, stars became nebulae and nebulae became stars, and still Randolph Carter fellthrough those endless voids of sentient blackness.

Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmoschurned itself into another futile completion, and all things became again as they were unreckonedkalpas 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 andgone, 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 inthe eyes of the falling dreamer. There were gods and presences and wills; beauty and evil, andthe shrieking of noxious night robbed of its prey. For through the unknown ultimate cycle hadlived a thought and a vision of a dreamer’s boyhood, and now there were re-made a wakingworld and an old cherished city to body and to justify these things. Out of the void S’ngacthe violet gas had pointed the way, and archaic Nodens was bellowing his guidance from unhinteddeeps.

Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, andpurple, and still the dreamer fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back thefiends from outside. And hoary Nodens raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on hisquarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared his formless hunting-horrors to grey dust. RandolphCarter had indeed descended at last the wide marmoreal flights to his marvellous city, for hewas come again to the fair New England world that had wrought him.

So to the organ chords of morning’s myriad whistles, and dawn’sblaze thrown dazzling through purple panes by the great gold dome of the State House on thehill, Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardensand the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from arbours his grandfather had reared. Beautyand light glowed from classic mantel and carven cornice and walls grotesquely figured, whilea sleek black cat rose yawning from hearthside sleep that his master’s start and shriekhad disturbed. And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted woodand the garden lands and the Cerenerian Sea and the twilight reaches of Inganok, the crawlingchaos 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 scentedrevels in the marvellous sunset city.

I.

In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with Bokhara rugs of impressiveage and workmanship four men were sitting around a document-strown table. From the far corners,where odd tripods of wrought-iron were now and then replenished by an incredibly aged negroin sombre livery, came the hypnotic fumes of olibanum; while in a deep niche on one side thereticked a curious coffin-shaped clock whose dial bore baffling hieroglyphs and whose four handsdid not move in consonance with any time system known on this planet. It was a singular anddisturbing room, but well fitted to the business now at hand. For here, in the New Orleans homeof this continent’s greatest mystic, mathematician, and orientalist, there was beingsettled at last the estate of a scarcely less great mystic, scholar, author, and dreamer whohad vanished from the face of the earth four years before.

Randolph Carter, who had all his life sought to escape from the tedium andlimitations of waking reality in the beckoning vistas of dreams and fabled avenues of otherdimensions, disappeared from the sight of man on the seventh of October, 1928, at the age offifty-four. His career had been a strange and lonely one, and there were those who inferredfrom his curious novels many episodes more bizarre than any in his recorded history. His associationwith Harley Warren, the South Carolina mystic whose studies in the primal Naacal language ofthe Himalayan priests had led to such outrageous conclusions, had been close. Indeed, it washe who—one mist-mad, terrible night in an ancient graveyard—had seen Warren descendinto a dank and nitrous vault, never to emerge. Carter lived in Boston, but it was from thewild, haunted hills behind hoary and witch-accursed Arkham that all his forbears had come.And it was amid those ancient, cryptically brooding hills that he had ultimately vanished.

His old servant Parks—who died early in 1930—had spoken of thestrangely aromatic and hideously carven box he had found in the attic, and of the undecipherableparchments and queerly figured silver key which that box had contained; matters of which Carterhad also written to others. Carter, he said, had told him that this key had come down from hisancestors, and that it would help him to unlock the gate to his lost boyhood, and to strangedimensions and fantastic realms which he had hitherto visited only in vague, brief, and elusivedreams. Then one day Carter took the box and its contents and rode away in his car, never toreturn.

Later on people found the car at the side of an old, grass-grown road in thehills behind crumbling Arkham—the hills where Carter’s forbears had once dwelt,and where the ruined cellar of the great Carter homestead still gaped to the sky. It was ina grove of tall elms near by 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 ominouspotions still earlier. The region had been settled in 1692 by fugitives from the witchcrafttrials 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 sorcerieswere 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 parchmentwhich no man could read. The Silver Key was gone—presumably with Carter. Further thanthat there was no certain clue. Detectives from Boston said that the fallen timbers of theold 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 whisperedof 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 aboy. In Carter’s boyhood the venerable gambrel-roofed homestead was still standing andtenanted by his great-uncle Christopher. He had visited there often, and had talked singularlyabout the Snake-Den. People remembered what he had said about a deep fissure and an unknowninner cave beyond, and speculated on the change he had shewn after spending one whole memorableday in the cavern when he was nine. That was in October, too—and ever after that he hadseemed to have an uncanny knack at prophesying future events.

It had rained late in the night that Carter vanished, and no one was quiteable to trace his footprints from the car. Inside the Snake-Den all was amorphous liquid mudowing to copious seepage. Only the ignorant rustics whispered about the prints they thoughtthey 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 littletracks 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’speculiar heel-less boots had met the stubby little tracks in the road. Old Benijah had beenthe 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 toParks and others that the queerly arabesqued Silver Key would help him unlock the gate of hislost boyhood—which caused a number of mystical students to declare that the missing manhad actually doubled back on the trail of time and returned through forty-five years to thatother October day in 1883 when he had stayed in the Snake-Den as a small boy. When he came outthat night, they argued, he had somehow made the whole trip to 1928 and back—for did henot thereafter know of things which were to happen later? And yet he had never spoken of anythingto happen after 1928.

One student—an elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island, who hadenjoyed 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 manpublished a tale of Carter’s vanishing, in which he hinted that the lost one now reignedas king on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffsof glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singularlabyrinths.

It was this old man, Ward Phillips, who pleaded most loudly against the apportionmentof Carter’s estate to his heirs—all distant cousins—on the ground that hewas still alive in another time-dimension and might well return some day. Against him was arrayedthe legal talent of one of the cousins, Ernest B. Aspinwall of Chicago, a man ten years Carter’ssenior, but keen as a youth in forensic battles. For four years the contest had raged, butnow the time for apportionment had come, and this vast, strange room in New Orleans was to bethe scene of the arrangements.

It was the home of Carter’s literary and financial executor—thedistinguished 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 memorablejoint furlough, the learned young Creole had taken the wistful Boston dreamer to Bayonne, inthe south of France, and had shewn him certain terrible secrets in the nighted and immemorialcrypts that burrow beneath that brooding, aeon-weighted city, the friendship was forever sealed.Carter’s will had named de Marigny as executor, and now that vivid scholar was reluctantlypresiding over the settlement of the estate. It was sad work for him, for like the old Rhode-Islanderhe did not believe that Carter was dead. But what weight have the dreams of mystics againstthe harsh wisdom of the world?

Around the table in that strange room in the old French quarter sat the menwho claimed an interest in the proceedings. There had been the usual legal advertisem*nts ofthe conference in papers wherever Carter heirs were thought to live, yet only four now sat listeningto the abnormal ticking of that coffin-shaped clock which told no earthly time, and to the bubblingof the courtyard fountain beyond half-curtained, fanlighted windows. As the hours wore on thefaces of the four were half-shrouded in the curling fumes from the tripods, which, piled recklesslywith fuel, seemed to need less and less attention from the silently gliding and increasinglynervous old negro.

There was Etienne de Marigny himself—slim, dark, handsome, moustached,and still young. Aspinwall, representing the heirs, was white-haired, apoplectic-faced, side-whiskered,and portly. Phillips, the Providence mystic, was lean, grey, long-nosed, clean-shaven, andstoop-shouldered. The fourth man was non-committal in age—lean, and with a dark, bearded,singularly immobile face of very regular contour, bound with the turban of a high-caste Brahminand having night-black, burning, almost irisless eyes which seemed to gaze out from a vast distancebehind the features. He had announced himself as the Swami Chandraputra, an adept from Benareswith important information to give; and both de Marigny and Phillips—who had correspondedwith him—had been quick to recognise the genuineness of his mystical pretensions. Hisspeech had an oddly forced, hollow, metallic quality, as if the use of English taxed his vocalapparatus; 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 peculiarlybadly on him, while his bushy black beard, Eastern turban, and large white mittens gave himan 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. Col. Churchward declares it is not Naacal, and it looks nothing at alllike the hieroglyphs on that Easter Island wooden club. The carvings on that box, though, dostrongly suggest Easter Island images. The nearest thing I can recall to these parchment characters—noticehow all the letters seem to hang down from horizontal word-bars—is the writing in a bookpoor 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 tookit with him in December when he went down into the vault in that old graveyard—but neitherhe nor the book ever came to the surface again. Some time ago I sent our friend here—theSwami Chandraputra—a memory-sketch of some of those letters, and also a photostatic copyof the Carter parchment. He believes he may be able to shed light on them after certain referencesand consultations.”

“But the key—Carter sent me a photograph of that. Its curious arabesqueswere not letters, but seem to have belonged to the same culture-tradition as the hieroglyphson the parchment. Carter always spoke of being on the point of solving the mystery, though henever gave details. Once he grew almost poetic about the whole business. That antique SilverKey, he said, would unlock the successive doors that bar our free march down the mighty corridorsof space and time to the very Border which no man has crossed since Shaddad with his terrificgenius built and concealed in the sands of Arabia Petraea the prodigious domes and uncountedminarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half-starved dervishes—wrote Carter—and thirst-crazednomads have returned to tell of that monumental portal, and of the Hand that is sculptured abovethe keystone of the arch, but no man has passed and returned to say that his footprints on thegarnet-strown sands within bear witness to his visit. The key, he surmised, was that for whichthe Cyclopean sculptured Hand vainly grasps.”

“Why Carter didn’t take the parchment as well as the key, we cannotsay. Perhaps he forgot it—or perhaps he forbore to take it through recollection of onewho had taken a book of like characters into a vault and never returned. Or perhaps it was reallyimmaterial to what he wished to do.”

As de Marigny paused, old Mr. Phillips spoke in 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 thingsin Ulthar, beyond the river Skai. It does not appear that the parchment was needed, for certainlyCarter reëntered 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 that old fool up? We’ve had enough ofthese 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. Aspinwalldoes not do well to laugh at the evidence of dreams. Mr. Phillips has taken an incomplete view—perhapsbecause he has not dreamed enough. I, myself, have done much dreaming—we in India havealways done that, just as all the Carters seem to have done it. You, Mr. Aspinwall, as a maternalcousin, 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 forgotthat parchment—which he couldn’t then decipher—yet it would have been wellfor him had he remembered to take it. You see, I have really learned pretty much what happenedto Carter after he left his car with the Silver Key at sunset on that seventh of October, fouryears 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 seemedto fall into bizarre patterns like the dots and dashes of some alien and insoluble telegraphmessage from outer space. The Hindoo leaned back, half closed his eyes, and continued in thatoddly laboured yet idiomatic voice, while before his audience there began to float a pictureof what had happened to Randolph Carter.

II.

The hills behind Arkham are full of a strange magic—something, perhaps, which the oldwizard Edmund Carter called down from the stars and up from the crypts of nether earth whenhe fled there from Salem in 1692. As soon as Randolph Carter was back among them he knew thathe was close to one of the gates which a few audacious, abhorred, and alien-souled men haveblasted through titan walls betwixt the world and the outside absolute. Here, he felt, and onthis day of the year, he could carry out with success the message he had deciphered months beforefrom the arabesques of that tarnished and incredibly ancient Silver Key. He knew now how itmust be rotated, how it must be held up to the setting sun, and what syllables of ceremony mustbe intoned into the void at the ninth and last turning. In a spot as close to a dark polarityand induced gate as this, it could not fail in its primary function. Certainly, he would restthat 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 uphill deeper anddeeper into the shadowy core of that brooding, haunted countryside of winding road, vine-grownstone wall, black woodland, gnarled, neglected orchard, gaping-windowed, deserted farmhouse,and nameless ruin. At the sunset hour, when the distant spires of Kingsport gleamed in the ruddyblaze, he took out the key and made the needed turnings and intonations. Only later did he realisehow soon the ritual had taken effect.

Then in the deepening twilight he had heard a voice out of the past. Old BenijahCorey, his great-uncle’s hired man. Had not old Benijah been dead for thirty years? Thirtyyears before when? What was time? Where had he been? Why was it strange that Benijah shouldbe calling him on this seventh of October, 1883? Was he not out later than Aunt Martha had toldhim to stay? What was this key in his blouse pocket, where his little telescope—givenhim by his father on his ninth birthday two months before—ought to be? Had he found itin the attic at home? Would it unlock the mystic pylon which his sharp eye had traced amidstthe jagged rocks at the back of that inner cave behind the Snake-Den on the hill? That was theplace 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 greatblack inner chamber with the pylon. Whose hands had carved that hint of a pylon out of the livingrock? 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-roofedfarmhouse.

Next morning he was up early, and out through the twisted-boughed apple orchardto the upper timber-lot where the mouth of the Snake-Den lurked black and forbidding amongstgrotesque, overnourished oaks. A nameless expectancy was upon him, and he did not even noticethe loss of his handkerchief as he fumbled in his blouse pocket to see if the queer Silver Keywas safe. He crawled through the dark orifice with tense, adventurous assurance, lighting hisway with matches taken from the sitting-room. In another moment he had wriggled through theroot-choked fissure at the farther end, and was in the vast, unknown inner grotto whose ultimaterock wall seemed half like a monstrous and consciously shapen pylon. Before that dank, drippingwall he stood silent and awestruck, lighting one match after another as he gazed. Was that stonybulge above the keystone of the imagined arch really a gigantic sculptured hand? Then he drewforth 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 untrammelledland of his dreams and the gulfs where all dimensions dissolve in the absolute.

III.

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 limitedcausation and tri-dimensional logic. As the Hindoo continued his tale, he had difficulty inavoiding what seemed—even more than the notion of a man transferred through the yearsto boyhood—an air of trivial, puerile extravagance. Mr. Aspinwall, in disgust, gave anapoplectic 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 anaura of strange, awesome mutation was apparent—a sense of incalculable disturbance andconfusion in time and space, yet one which held no hint of what we recognise as motion and duration.Imperceptibly, such things as age and location ceased to have any significance whatever. Theday before, Randolph Carter had miraculously leaped a gulf of years. Now there was no distinctionbetween boy and man. There was only the entity Randolph Carter, with a certain store of imageswhich had lost all connexion with terrestrial scenes and circ*mstances of acquisition. A momentbefore, there had been an inner cave with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and giganticsculptured hand on the farther wall. Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neitherwall 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 ofall that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the way in which he receivedthem.

By the time the rite was over Carter knew that he was in no region whose placecould be told by earth’s geographers, and in no age whose date history could fix. Forthe nature of what was happening was not wholly unfamiliar to him. There were hints of it inthe cryptical Pnakotic fragments, and a whole chapter in the forbidden Necronomiconof the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred had taken on significance when he had deciphered the designsgraven on the Silver Key. A gate had been unlocked—not indeed the Ultimate Gate, butone leading from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time, and from whichin turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outsideall earths, all universes, and all matter.

There would be a Guide—and a very terrible one; a Guide who had beenan entity of earth millions of years before, when man was undreamed of, and when forgotten shapesmoved on a steaming planet building strange cities among whose last, crumbling ruins the earliestmammals were to play. Carter remembered what the monstrous Necronomicon had vaguely anddisconcertingly adumbrated concerning that Guide.

“And while there are those”, the mad Arab had written, “whohave dared to seek glimpses beyond the Veil, and to accept HIM as a Guide, they would have beenmore prudent had they avoided commerce with HIM; for it is written in the Book of Thoth howterrific is the price of a single glimpse. Nor may those who pass ever return, for in the Vastnessestranscending our world are Shapes of darkness that seize and bind. The Affair that shamblethabout in the night, the Evil that defieth the Elder Sign, the Herd that stand watch at the secretportal each tomb is known to have, and that thrive on that which groweth out of the tenantswithin—all these Blacknesses are lesser than HE Who guardeth the Gateway; HE Who willguide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss of unnamable Devourers. For HE is ’UMRAT-TAWIL, the Most Ancient One, which the scribe rendereth as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE.”

Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidstthe seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he feltthat 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 onlysymbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape whichinterweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know.

There floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which hesomehow linked with earth’s primal, aeon-forgotten past. Monstrous living things moveddeliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork that no sane dream ever held, and landscapesbore incredible vegetation and cliffs and mountains and masonry of no human pattern. There werecities under the sea, and denizens thereof; and towers in great deserts where globes and cylindersand nameless winged entities shot off into space or hurtled down out of space. All this Cartergrasped, though the images bore no fixed relation to one another or to him. He himself had nostable form or position, but only such shifting hints of form and position as his whirling fancysupplied.

He had wished to find the enchanted regions of his boyhood dreams, where galleyssail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, and elephant caravans tramp throughperfumed jungles in Kled beyond forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns that sleep lovelyand 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 thedreaded Guide without fear, asking monstrous and terrible things of him.

All at once the pageant of impressions seemed to achieve a vague kind of stabilisation.There were great masses of towering stone, carven into alien and incomprehensible designs anddisposed according to the laws of some unknown, inverse geometry. Light filtered down from asky of no assignable colour in baffling, contradictory directions, and played almost sentientlyover what seemed to be a curved line of gigantic hieroglyphed pedestals more hexagonal thanotherwise and surmounted by cloaked, ill-defined Shapes.

There was another Shape, too, which occupied no pedestal, but which seemedto 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 Shapeson the pedestals, with some neutral-coloured fabric; and Carter could not detect any eye-holesthrough which it might gaze. Probably it did not need to gaze, for it seemed to belong to anorder of being far outside the merely physical in organisation and faculties.

A moment later Carter knew that this was so, for the Shape had spoken to hismind 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. Forthis Shape was nothing less than that which all the world has feared since Lomar rose out ofthe sea and the Winged Ones came to earth to teach the Elder Lore to man. It was indeed thefrightful Guide and Guardian of the Gate—’Umr at-Tawil, the ancient one, which thescribe 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 ormalignity in what he radiated, and Carter wondered for a moment whether the mad Arab’sterrific blasphemous hints, and extracts from the Book of Thoth, might not have come from envyand a baffled wish to do what was now about to be done. Or perhaps the Guide reserved his horrorand malignity for those who feared. As the radiations continued, Carter mentally interpretedthem in the form of words.

“I am indeed that Most Ancient One”, said the Guide, “ofwhom you know. We have awaited you—the Ancient Ones and I. You are welcome, even thoughlong delayed. You have the Key, and have unlocked the First Gate. Now the Ultimate Gate is readyfor your trial. If you fear, you need not advance. You may still go back unharmed the way youcame. But if you choose to advance . . .”

The pause was ominous, but the radiations continued to be friendly. Carterhesitated 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 robewhich may or may not have involved the lifting of an arm or some hom*ologous member. A secondsign followed, and from his well-learnt lore Carter knew that he was at last very close to theUltimate Gate. The light now changed to another inexplicable colour, and the Shapes on thequasi-hexagonal pedestals became more clearly defined. As they sat more erect, their outlinesbecame more like those of men, though Carter knew that they could not be men. Upon their cloakedheads there now seemed to rest tall, uncertainly coloured mitres, strangely suggestive of thoseon certain nameless figures chiselled 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 sceptreswhose carven heads bodied forth a grotesque and archaic mystery.

Carter guessed what they were, whence they came, and Whom they served; andguessed, too, the price of their service. But he was still content, for at one mighty venturehe was to learn all. Damnation, he reflected, is but a word bandied about by those whose blindnessleads them to condemn all who can see, even with a single eye. He wondered at the vast conceitof those who had babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones, as if They could pause from theireverlasting dreams to wreak a wrath upon mankind. As well, he thought, might a mammoth pauseto visit frantic vengeance on an angleworm. Now the whole assemblage on the vaguely hexagonalpillars was greeting him with a gesture of those oddly carven sceptres, and radiating a messagewhich 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 MostAncient One told him it was reserved for him. He saw also another pedestal, taller than therest, and at the centre of the oddly curved line (neither semicircle nor ellipse, parabola norhyperbola) which they formed. This, he guessed, was the Guide’s own throne. Moving andrising in a manner hardly definable, Carter took his seat; and as he did so he saw that theGuide had likewise seated himself.

Gradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was holdingsomething—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 sphereof some obscurely iridescent metal, and as the Guide put it forward a low, pervasive half-impressionof sound began to rise and fall in intervals which seemed to be rhythmic even thoughthey followed no rhythm of earth. There was a suggestion of chanting—or what human imaginationmight interpret as chanting. Presently the quasi-sphere began to grow luminous, and as it gleamedup into a cold, pulsating light of unassignable colour Carter saw that its flickerings conformedto the alien rhythm of the chant. Then all the mitred, sceptre-bearing Shapes on the pedestalscommenced a slight, curious swaying in the same inexplicable rhythm, while nimbuses of unclassifiablelight—resembling that of the quasi-sphere—played round their shrouded heads.

The Hindoo paused in his tale and looked curiously at the tall, coffin-shapedclock with the four hands and hieroglyphed dial, whose crazy ticking followed no known rhythmof earth.

“_You, Mr. de Marigny”_, he suddenly said to his learned host, “donot need to be told the particular alien rhythm to which those cowled Shapes on the hexagonalpillars chanted and nodded. You are the only one else—in America—who has had a tasteof the Outer Extension. That clock—I suppose it was sent you by the Yogi poor Harley Warrenused to talk about—the seer who said that he alone of living men had been to Yian-Ho,the hidden legacy of sinister, aeon-old Leng, and had borne certain things away from that dreadfuland forbidden city. I wonder how many of its subtler properties you know? If my dreams and readingsbe correct, it was made by those who knew much of the First Gateway. But let me go on with mytale.”

At last, continued the Swami, the swaying and the suggestion of chanting ceased,the lambent nimbuses around the now drooping and motionless heads faded away, while the cloakedShapes slumped curiously on their pedestals. The quasi-sphere, however, continued to pulsatewith inexplicable light. Carter felt that the Ancient Ones were sleeping as they had been whenhe first saw them, and he wondered out of what cosmic dreams his coming had wakened them. Slowlythere 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 kindof sleep, in order that their dreams might open the Ultimate Gate to which the Silver Key wasa passport. He knew that in the profundity of this deep sleep they were contemplating unplumbedvastnesses of utter and absolute Outsideness with which the earth had nothing to do, and thatthey were to accomplish that which his presence had demanded.

The Guide did not share this sleep, but seemed still to be giving instructionsin some subtle, soundless way. Evidently he was implanting images of those things which hewished the Companions to dream; and Carter knew that as each of the Ancient Ones pictured theprescribed thought, there would be born the nucleus of a manifestation visible to his own earthlyeyes. When the dreams of all the Shapes had achieved a oneness, that manifestation would occur,and everything he required be materialised, through concentration. He had seen such thingson earth—in India, where the combined, projected will of a circle of adepts can make athought take tangible substance, and in hoary Atlaanât, of which few men dare speak.

Just what the Ultimate Gate was, and how it was to be passed, Carter couldnot be certain; but a feeling of tense expectancy surged over him. He was conscious of havinga kind of body, and of holding the fateful Silver Key in his hand. The masses of towering stoneopposite him seemed to possess the evenness of a wall, toward the centre of which his eyes wereirresistibly drawn. And then suddenly he felt the mental currents of the Most Ancient One ceaseto flow forth.

For the first time Carter realised how terrific utter silence, mental and physical,may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible rhythm, if only thefaint, cryptical pulse of the earth’s dimensional extension, but now the hush of the abyssseemed to fall upon everything. Despite his intimations of body, he had no audible breath; andthe 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, blazedfrozenly 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 uponblacknesses, while about the Ancient Ones, so close on their pseudo-hexagonal thrones, therehovered an air of the most stupefying remoteness. Then he felt himself wafted into immeasurabledepths, with waves of perfumed warmth lapping against his face. It was as if he floated in atorrid, rose-tinctured sea; a sea of drugged wine whose waves broke foaming against shores ofbrazen fire. A great fear clutched him as he half saw that vast expanse of surging sea lappingagainst its far-off coast. But the moment of silence was broken—the surgings were speakingto him in a language that was not of physical sound or articulate words.

“The man of Truth is beyond good and evil”, intoned a voice thatwas not a voice. “The man of Truth has ridden to All-Is-One. The man of Truth has learntthat Illusion is the only reality, and that substance is an impostor.”

And now, in that rise of masonry to which his eyes had been so irresistiblydrawn, there appeared the outline of a titanic arch not unlike that which he thought he hadglimpsed so long ago in that cave within a cave, on the far, unreal surface of the three-dimensionedearth. He realised that he had been using the Silver Key—moving it in accord with an unlearntand instinctive ritual closely akin to that which had opened the Inner Gate. That rose-drunkensea which lapped his cheeks was, he realised, no more or less than the adamantine mass of thesolid wall yielding before his spell, and the vortex of thought with which the Ancient Oneshad aided his spell. Still guided by instinct and blind determination, he floated forward—andthrough the Ultimate Gate.

IV.

Randolph Carter’s advance through that Cyclopean bulk of abnormal masonry was like a dizzyprecipitation through the measureless gulfs between the stars. From a great distance he felttriumphant, 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 inthe 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 Formscould 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 abouthis bodily form and about his relationship to the mistily defined objects around him, but ithad not disturbed his sense of unity. He had still been Randolph Carter, a fixed point in thedimensional seething. Now, beyond the Ultimate Gateway, he realised in a moment of consumingfright 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 littleboy named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake-Den in the hushed evening light and runningdown the rocky slope and through the twisted-boughed orchard toward his Uncle Christopher’shouse in the hills beyond Arkham—yet at that same moment, which was also somehow in theearthly year of 1928, a vague shadow not less Randolph Carter was sitting on a pedestal amongthe Ancient Ones in earth’s trans-dimensional extension. Here, too, was a third RandolphCarter in the unknown and formless cosmic abyss beyond the Ultimate Gate. And elsewhere, ina chaos of scenes whose infinite multiplicity and monstrous diversity brought him close to thebrink of madness, were a limitless confusion of beings which he knew were as much himself asthe local manifestation now beyond the Ultimate Gate.

There were “Carters” in settings belonging to every known and suspectedage of earth’s history, and to remoter ages of earthly entity transcending knowledge,suspicion, and credibility. “Carters” of forms both human and non-human, vertebrateand 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 otherplanets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua. Spores of eternal life drifting fromworld to world, universe to universe, yet all equally himself. Some of the glimpses recalleddreams—both faint and vivid, single and persistent—which he had had through thelong years since he first began to dream, and a few possessed a haunting, fascinating, and almosthorrible familiarity which no earthly logic could explain.

Faced with this realisation, Randolph Carter reeled in the clutch of supremehorror—horror such as had not been hinted even at the climax of that hideous night whentwo had ventured into an ancient and abhorred necropolis under a waning moon and only one hademerged. No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from aloss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existenceand yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings—thatone 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 surewhether he—the fragment or facet of an earthly entity beyond the Ultimate Gate—hadbeen that one or some other. His self had been annihilated; and yet he—if indeedthere could, in view of that utter nullity of individual existence, be such a thing as he —wasequally aware of being in some inconceivable way a legion of selves. It was as though his bodyhad been suddenly transformed into one of those many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculpturedin Indian temples, and he contemplated the aggregation in a bewildered attempt to discern whichwas the original and which the additions—if indeed (supremely monstrous thought) therewere any original as distinguished from other embodiments.

Then, in the midst of these devastating reflections, Carter’s beyond-the-gatefragment was hurled from what had seemed the nadir of horror to black, clutching pits of a horrorstill more profound. This time it was largely external—a force or personality which atonce 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 coexistent with all time and coterminouswith all space. There was no visual image, yet the sense of entity and the awful concept ofcombined localism, identity, and infinity lent a paralysing terror beyond anything which anyCarter-fragment had hitherto deemed capable of existing.

In the face of that awful wonder, the quasi-Carter forgot the horror of destroyedindividuality. It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self—not merelya thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence’swhole unbounded sweep—the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreachesfancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whisperedof as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceansof Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae knowby an untranslatable Sign—yet in a flash the Carter-facet realised how slight and fractionalall these conceptions are.

And now the BEING was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves thatsmote and burned and thundered—a concentration of energy that blasted its recipient withwell-nigh unendurable violence, and that followed, with certain definite variations, the singularunearthly rhythm which had marked the chanting and swaying of the Ancient Ones, and the flickeringof the monstrous lights, in that baffling region beyond the First Gate. It was as though sunsand worlds and universes had converged upon one point whose very position in space they hadconspired to annihilate with an impact of resistless fury. But amidst the greater terror onelesser terror was diminished; for the searing waves appeared somehow to isolate the beyond-the-gateCarter from his infinity of duplicates—to restore, as it were, a certain amount of theillusion of identity. After a time the hearer began to translate the waves into speech-formsknown to him, and his sense of horror and oppression waned. Fright became pure awe, and whathad seemed blasphemously abnormal seemed now only ineffably majestic.

“Randolph Carter”, IT seemed to say, “MY manifestations onyour planet’s extension, the Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would lately havereturned to small lands of dream which he had lost, yet who with greater freedom has risen togreater and nobler desires and curiosities. You wished to sail up golden Oukranos, to searchout forgotten ivory cities in orchid-heavy Kled, 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 firmamentalien to your earth and to all matter. Now, with the passing of two Gates, you wish loftierthings. You would not flee like a child from a scene disliked to a dream beloved, but wouldplunge 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 whichI have granted eleven times only to beings of your planet—five times only to those youcall men, or those resembling them. I am ready to shew you the Ultimate Mystery, to look onwhich is to blast a feeble spirit. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secretsyou may still wield a free choice, and return if you will through the two Gates with the Veilstill unrent before your eyes.”

V.

A sudden shutting-off of the waves left Carter in a chilling and awesome silence full of thespirit of desolation. On every hand pressed the illimitable vastness of the void, yet the seekerknew that the BEING was still there. After a moment he thought of words whose mental substancehe flung into the abyss:

“I accept. I will not retreat.”

The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the BEING had heard. Andnow there poured from that limitless MIND a flood of knowledge and explanation which openednew vistas to the seeker, and prepared him for such a grasp of the cosmos as he had never hopedto possess. He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, andwhat an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward,right-left. He was shewn the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little gods of earth, withtheir petty, human interests and connexions—their hatreds, rages, loves, and vanities;their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faith contrary to reason and Nature.

While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words, therewere others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with eyes and perhaps with imaginationhe perceived that he was in a region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brainof man. He saw now, in the brooding shadows of that which had been first a vortex of power andthen an illimitable void, a sweep of creation that dizzied his senses. From some inconceivablevantage-point he looked upon prodigious forms whose multiple extensions transcended any conceptionof being, size, and boundaries which his mind had hitherto been able to hold, despite a lifetimeof cryptical study. He began to understand dimly why there could exist at the same time thelittle boy Randolph Carter in the Arkham farmhouse in 1883, the misty form on the vaguely hexagonalpillar beyond the First Gate, the fragment now facing the PRESENCE in the limitless abyss, andall 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 ofsome corresponding figure of one more dimension—as a square is cut from a cube or a circlefrom a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding formsof four dimensions that men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cutfrom forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypalinfinity. The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimalthing—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 brandthoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. Thatwhich we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow andillusion is substance and reality.

Time, the waves went on, is motionless, and without beginning or end. Thatit 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 isillusion. All that was, and is, and is to be, exists simultaneously.

These revelations came with a godlike solemnity which left Carter unable todoubt. Even though they lay almost beyond his comprehension, he felt that they must be truein the light of that final cosmic reality which belies all local perspectives and narrow partialviews; and he was familiar enough with profound speculations to be free from the bondage oflocal and partial conceptions. Had his whole quest not been based upon a faith in the unrealityof the local and partial?

After an impressive pause the waves continued, saying that what the denizensof few-dimensioned zones call change is merely a function of their consciousness, which viewsthe external world from various cosmic angles. As the shapes produced by the cutting of a coneseem to vary with the angles of cutting—being circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbolaaccording to that angle, yet without any change in the cone itself—so do the local aspectsof an unchanged and endless reality seem to change with the cosmic angle of regarding. To thisvariety of angles of consciousness the feeble beings of the inner worlds are slaves, since withrare exceptions they cannot learn to control them. Only a few students of forbidden things havegained inklings of this control, and have thereby conquered time and change. But the entitiesoutside 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 accordancewith 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 horrifiedhim. His intuition pieced together the fragments of revelation, and brought him closer and closerto a grasp of the secret. He understood that much of the frightful revelation would have comeupon him—splitting up his ego amongst myriads of earthly counterparts—inside theFirst Gate, had not the magic of ’Umr at-Tawil kept it from him in order that he mightuse the Silver Key with precision for the Ultimate Gate’s opening. Anxious for clearerknowledge, he sent out waves of thought, asking more of the exact relationship between his variousfacets—the fragment now beyond the Ultimate Gate, the fragment still on the quasi-hexagonalpedestal beyond the First Gate, the boy of 1883, the man of 1928, the various ancestral beingswho had formed his heritage and the bulwark of his ego, and the nameless denizens of the otheraeons and other worlds which that first hideous flash of ultimate perception had identifiedwith him. Slowly the waves of the BEING surged out in reply, trying to make plain what was almostbeyond 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 archetypaland 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, young man, oldman—is merely one of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and eternal being, causedby a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane which cuts it. Randolph Carter at allages; 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—phantomprojections differentiated only by the angle at which the plane of consciousness happened tocut the eternal archetype in each case.

A slight change of angle could turn the student of today into the child ofyesterday; could turn Randolph Carter into that wizard Edmund Carter who fled from Salem tothe hills behind Arkham in 1692, or that Pickman Carter who in the year 2169 would use strangemeans in repelling the Mongol hordes from Australia; could turn a human Carter into one of thoseearlier entities which had dwelt in primal Hyperborea and worshipped black, plastic Tsathogguaafter flying down from Kythanil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus; couldturn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely ancestral and doubtfully shaped dweller on Kythanilitself, or a still remoter creature of trans-galactic Shonhi, or a four-dimensioned gaseousconsciousness in an older space-time continuum, or a vegetable brain of the future on a darkradio-active comet of inconceivable orbit—and so on, in the endless cosmic circle.

The archetypes, 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 suchwas this informing BEING itself . . . which indeed was Carter’s ownarchetype. The glutless zeal of Carter and all his forbears for forbidden cosmic secretswas 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’sconsciousness did homage to that transcendent ENTITY from which it was derived. As the wavespaused 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 withunaccustomed vistas and unforeseen disclosures. It occurred to him that, if those disclosureswere literally true, he might bodily visit all those infinitely distant ages and partsof the universe which he had hitherto known only in dreams, could he but command the magic tochange the angle of his consciousness-plane. And did not the Silver Key supply that magic? Hadit not first changed him from a man in 1928 to a boy in 1883, and then to something quite outsidetime? Oddly, despite his present apparent absence of body, he knew that the Key was still withhim.

While the silence still lasted, Randolph Carter radiated forth the thoughtsand questions which assailed him. He knew that in this ultimate abyss he was equidistant fromevery facet of his archetype—human or non-human, earthly or extra-earthly, galactic ortrans-galactic; and his curiosity regarding the other phases of his being—especially thosephases which were farthest from an earthly 1928 in time and space, or which had most persistentlyhaunted his dreams throughout life—was at fever heat. He felt that his archetypal ENTITYcould at will send him bodily to any of these phases of bygone and distant life by changinghis consciousness-plane, and despite the marvels he had undergone he burned for the furthermarvel of walking in the flesh through those grotesque and incredible scenes which visionsof 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, dizzy black crags, clawed,tapir-snouted denizens, bizarre metal towers, unexplained tunnels, and cryptical floating cylindershad intruded again and again upon his slumbers. That world, he felt vaguely, was in all theconceivable cosmos the one most freely in touch with others; and he longed to explore the vistaswhose beginnings he had glimpsed, and to embark through space to those still remoter worldswith which the clawed, snouted denizens trafficked. There was no time for fear. As at all crisesof his strange life, sheer cosmic curiosity triumphed over everything else.

When the waves resumed their awesome pulsing Carter knew that his terriblerequest was granted. The BEING was telling him of the nighted gulfs through which he would haveto pass, of the unknown quintuple star in an unsuspected galaxy around which the alien worldrevolved, and of the burrowing inner horrors against which the clawed, snouted race of thatworld 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-forworld, would have to be tilted simultaneously in order to restore to that world the Carter-facetwhich had dwelt there.

The PRESENCE warned him to be sure of his symbols if he wished ever to returnfrom 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 bothworld 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 monstrousprecipitation. The waves abruptly ceased, and there supervened a momentary stillness tense withnameless and dreadful expectancy.

Then, without warning, came a whirring and drumming that swelled to a terrificthundering. Once again Carter felt himself the focal point of an intense concentration of energywhich smote and hammered and seared unbearably in the now-familiar alien rhythm of outer space,and which he could not classify as either the blasting heat of a blazing star or the all-petrifyingcold of the ultimate abyss. Bands and rays of colour utterly foreign to any spectrum of ouruniverse played and wove and interlaced before him, and he was conscious of a frightful velocityof motion. He caught one fleeting glimpse of a figure sitting alone upon a cloudy thronemore hexagonal than otherwise. . . .

VI.

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 papersbefore him. The alien-rhythmed ticking of the coffin-shaped clock took on a new and portentousmeaning, while the fumes from the choked, neglected tripods wove themselves into fantastic andinexplicable shapes, and formed disturbing combinations with the grotesque figures of thedraught-swayed tapestries. The old negro who had tended them was gone—perhaps some growingtension had frightened him out of the house. An almost apologetic hesitancy hampered the speakeras he resumed in his oddly laboured yet idiomatic voice.

“You have found these things of the abyss hard to believe”, hesaid, “but you will find the tangible and material things ahead still harder. That isthe way of our minds. Marvels are doubly incredible when brought into three dimensions fromthe vague regions of possible dream. I shall not try to tell you much—that would be anotherand very different story. I will tell only what you absolutely have to know.”

Carter, after that final vortex of alien and polychromatic rhythm, had foundhimself in what for a moment he thought was his old insistent dream. He was, as many a nightbefore, walking amidst throngs of clawed, snouted beings through the streets of a labyrinthof inexplicably fashioned metal under a blaze of diverse solar colour; and as he looked downhe saw that his body was like those of the others—rugose, partly squamous, and curiouslyarticulated in a fashion mainly insect-like yet not without a caricaturish resemblance to thehuman outline. The Silver Key was still in his grasp—though held by a noxious-lookingclaw.

In another moment the dream-sense vanished, and he felt rather as one justawaked from a dream. The ultimate abyss—the BEING—an entity of absurd, outlandishrace called “Randolph Carter” on a world of the future not yet born—some ofthese things were parts of the persistent, recurrent dreams of the wizard Zkauba on the planetYaddith. They were too persistent—they interfered with his duties in weaving spells tokeep the frightful bholes in their burrows, and became mixed up with his recollections of themyriad real worlds he had visited in his light-beam envelope. And now they had become quasi-realas never before. This heavy, material Silver Key in his right upper claw, exact image of onehe had dreamt about, meant no good. He must rest and reflect, and consult the Tablets of Nhingfor advice on what to do. Climbing a metal wall in a lane off the main concourse, he enteredhis 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 thepeace 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, snouted thingwhich he had once been, and had become again.

The time-units spent on Yaddith, croaked the Swami—whose laboured voicewas beginning to shew signs of fatigue—made a tale in themselves which could not be relatedin brief compass. There were trips to Shonhi and Mthura and Kath, and other worlds in the twenty-eightgalaxies accessible to the light-beam envelopes of the creatures of Yaddith, and trips backand forth through aeons of time with the aid of the Silver Key and various other symbols knownto Yaddith’s wizards. There were hideous struggles with the bleached, viscous bholes inthe primal tunnels that honeycombed the planet. There were awed sessions in libraries amongstthe massed lore of ten thousand worlds living and dead. There were tense conferences with otherminds of Yaddith, including that of the Arch-Ancient Buo. Zkauba told no one of what had befallenhis personality, but when the Randolph Carter facet was uppermost he would study furiously everypossible means of returning to the earth and to human form, and would desperately practice humanspeech with the buzzing, alien throat-organs so ill adapted to it.

The Carter-facet had soon learned with horror that the Silver Key was unableto 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 Hyperboreaon 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 unchangedbody. There had been an added spell which gave it limitless powers it otherwise lacked; butthis, too, was a human discovery—peculiar to a spatially unreachable region, and not tobe duplicated by the wizards of Yaddith. It had been written on the undecipherable parchmentin the hideously carven box with the Silver Key, and Carter bitterly lamented that he had leftit 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 utilise the monstrous loreof Yaddith in finding a way back to the abyss and the omnipotent ENTITY. With his new knowledgehe could have done much toward reading the cryptic parchment; but that power, under presentconditions, 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 couldgrasp, since the beings of Yaddith die only after prolonged cycles. After many hundred revolutionsthe Carter-facet seemed to gain on the Zkauba-facet, and would spend vast periods calculatingthe distance of Yaddith in space and time from the human earth that was to be. The figures werestaggering—aeons of light-years beyond counting—but the immemorial lore of Yaddithfitted Carter to grasp such things. He cultivated the power of dreaming himself momentarilyearthward, and learned many things about our planet that he had never known before. But he couldnot dream the needed formula on the missing parchment.

Then at last he conceived a wild plan of escape from Yaddith—which beganwhen he found a drug that would keep his Zkauba-facet always dormant, yet without dissolutionof the knowledge and memories of Zkauba. He thought that his calculations would let him performa voyage with a light-wave envelope such as no being of Yaddith had ever performed—abodily voyage through nameless aeons and across incredible galactic reaches to the solarsystem and the earth itself. Once on earth, though in the body of a clawed, snouted thing, hemight be able somehow to find—and finish deciphering—the strangely hieroglyphedparchment he had left in the car at Arkham; and with its aid—and the Key’s—resumehis normal terrestrial semblance.

He was not blind to the perils of the attempt. He knew that when he had broughtthe planet-angle to the right aeon (a thing impossible to do while hurtling through space),Yaddith would be a dead world dominated by triumphant bholes, and that his escape in the light-waveenvelope would be a matter of grave doubt. Likewise was he aware of how he must achieve suspendedanimation, in the manner of an adept, to endure the aeon-long flight through fathomless abysses.He knew, too, that—assuming his voyage succeeded—he must immunise himself to thebacterial and other earthly conditions hostile to a body from Yaddith. Furthermore, he mustprovide a way of feigning human shape on earth until he might recover and decipher the parchmentand resume that shape in truth. Otherwise he would probably be discovered and destroyed bythe people in horror as a thing that should not be. And there must be some gold—luckilyobtainable on Yaddith—to tide him over that period of quest.

Slowly Carter’s plans went forward. He provided a light-wave envelopeof abnormal toughness, able to stand both the prodigious time-transition and the unexampledflight through space. He tested all his calculations, and sent forth his earthward dreams againand again, bringing them as close as possible to 1928. He practiced suspended animation withmarvellous success. He discovered just the bacterial agent he needed, and worked out the varyinggravity-stress to which he must become used. He artfully fashioned a waxen mask and loose costumeenabling him to pass among men as a human being of a sort, and devised a doubly potent spellwith which to hold back the bholes at the moment of his starting from the black, dead Yaddithof the inconceivable future. He took care, too, to assemble a large supply of the drugs—unobtainableon earth—which would keep his Zkauba-facet in abeyance till he might shed the Yaddithbody, 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 tohis envelope-platform, on the pretext of sailing for the triple star Nython, and crawled intothe sheath of shining metal. He had just room to perform the ritual of the Silver Key, and ashe did so he slowly started the levitation of his envelope. There was an appalling seethingand darkening of the day, and a 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 gnawedat the outside of his envelope, and he could see that he floated free in space—the metalbuilding from which he had started having decayed ages before. Below him the ground was festeringwith gigantic bholes; and even as he looked, one reared up several hundred feet and levelleda bleached, viscous end at him. But his spells were effective, and in another moment he wasfalling away from Yaddith unharmed.

VII.

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 believethese things until I have shewn you special proof. Accept it, then, as a myth, when I tell youof the thousands of light-years—thousands of years of time, and uncounted billionsof miles —that Randolph Carter hurtled through space as a nameless, alien entity ina thin envelope of electron-activated metal. He timed his period of suspended animation withutmost care, planning to have it end only a few years before the time of landing on the earthin or near 1928.”

“He will never forget that awakening. Remember, gentlemen, that beforethat aeon-long sleep he had lived consciously for thousands of terrestrial years amidst thealien and horrible wonders of Yaddith. There was a hideous gnawing of cold, a cessationof menacing dreams, and a glance through the eye-plates of the envelope. Stars, clusters, nebulae,on every hand— and at last their outlines bore some kinship to the constellations ofearth that he knew.”

“Some day his descent into the solar system may be told. He saw Kynarthand Yuggoth on the rim, passed close to Neptune and glimpsed the hellish white fungi that spotit, learned an untellable secret from the close-glimpsed mists of Jupiter and saw the horroron one of the satellites, and gazed at the Cyclopean ruins that sprawl over Mars’ ruddydisc. 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 those sensations as I learned them from Carter.”

“Well, toward the last Carter hovered about in the earth’s upperair waiting till daylight came over the western hemisphere. He wanted to land where he had left—nearthe Snake-Den in the hills behind Arkham. If any of you have been away from home long—andI know one of you has—I leave it to you how the sight of New England’s rolling hillsand 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, andwas thankful for the silence and solitude. It was autumn, as when he had left, and the smellof the hills was balm to his soul. He managed to drag the metal envelope up the slope of thetimber-lot into the Snake-Den, though it would not go through the weed-choked fissure to theinner cave. It was there also that he covered his alien body with the human clothing and waxenmask which would be necessary. He kept the envelope here for over a year, till certain circ*mstancesmade a new hiding-place necessary.”

“He walked to Arkham—incidentally practicing the management ofhis body in human posture and against terrestrial gravity—and got his gold changed tomoney at a bank. He also made some inquiries—posing as a foreigner ignorant of much English—andfound 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 needto conserve the alien drug which kept his Zkauba-facet dormant, he felt that he must act asquickly as possible. Going to Boston and taking a room in the decaying West End, where he couldlive cheaply and inconspicuously, he at once established inquiries concerning Randolph Carter’sestate and effects. It was then that he learned how anxious Mr. Aspinwall, here, was to havethe 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 ofthe missing parchment and began work on its deciphering. I am glad to say that I was able tohelp in all this—for he appealed to me quite early, and through me came in touch withother mystics throughout the world. I went to live with him in Boston—a wretched placein Chambers St. 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 cycles ago. It is, of course, atranslation—there was an Hyperborean original millions of years earlier in the primaltongue of Tsath-yo.”

“There was more to decipher than Carter had looked for, but at no timedid 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 handicaphas developed—the exhaustion of the alien drug which keeps the Zkauba-facet dormant. Thisis not, however, as great a calamity as was feared. Carter’s personality is gaining inthe body, and when Zkauba comes uppermost—for shorter and shorter periods, and now onlywhen evoked by some unusual excitement—he is generally too dazed to undo any of Carter’swork. He cannot find the metal envelope that would take him back to Yaddith, for although healmost did, once, Carter hid it anew at a time when the Zkauba-facet was wholly latent. Allthe harm he has done is to frighten a few people and create certain nightmare rumours amongthe Poles and Lithuanians of Boston’s West End. So far, he has never injured the carefuldisguise prepared by the Carter-facet, though he sometimes throws it off so that parts haveto be replaced. I have seen what lies beneath—and it is not good to see.”

“A month ago Carter saw the advertisem*nt of this meeting, and knew thathe must act quickly to save his estate. He could not wait to decipher the parchment and resumehis human form. Consequently he deputed me to act for him, and in that capacity I am here.”

“Gentlemen, I say to you that Randolph Carter is not dead; that he istemporarily in an anomalous condition, but that within two or three months at the outside hewill be able to appear in proper form and demand the custody of his estate. I am prepared tooffer proof if necessary. Therefore I beg that you adjourn this meeting for an indefinite period.”

VIII.

De Marigny and Phillips stared at the Hindoo as if hypnotised, while Aspinwall emitted a seriesof snorts and bellows. The old attorney’s disgust had by now surged into open rage, andhe pounded the table with an apoplectically veined fist. When he spoke, it was in a kind ofbark.

“How long is this foolery to be borne? I’ve listened an hour tothis madman—this faker—and now he has the damned effrontery to say that RandolphCarter is alive—to ask us to postpone the settlement for no good reason! Why don’tyou throw the scoundrel out, de Marigny? Do you mean to make us all the butts of a charlatanor idiot?”

De Marigny quietly raised his hands and spoke softly.

“Let us think slowly and clearly. This has been a very singular tale,and there are things in it which I, as a mystic not altogether ignorant, recognise as far fromimpossible. Furthermore—since 1930 I have received letters from the Swami which tallywith his account.”

As he paused, old Mr. Phillips ventured a word.

“Swami Chandraputra spoke of proofs. I, too, recognise much that is significantin this story, and I have myself had many oddly corroborative letters from the Swami duringthe last two years; but some of these statements are very extreme. Is there not something tangiblewhich can be shewn?”

At last the impassive-faced Swami replied, slowly and hoarsely, and drawingan 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 heavykey 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 andPhillips 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 belongedto my cousin, it’s up to this foreigner—this damned nigg*r—to explain howhe got it! Randolph Carter vanished with the key four years ago. How do we know he wasn’trobbed and murdered? He was half-crazy himself, and in touch with still crazier people.”

“Look here, you nigg*r—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 proofthat 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 RandolphCarter.”

He clumsily drew a long envelope from inside his loose coat and handed it tothe sputtering attorney as de Marigny and Phillips watched with chaotic thoughts and a dawningfeeling of supernal wonder.

“Of course the handwriting is almost illegible—but remember thatRandolph Carter now has no hands well adapted to forming human script.”

Aspinwall looked through the papers hurriedly, and was visibly perplexed, buthe did not change his demeanour. The room was tense with excitement and nameless dread, andthe alien rhythm of the coffin-shaped clock had an utterly diabolic sound to de Marigny andPhillips—though the lawyer seemed affected not at all. Aspinwall spoke again.

“These look like clever forgeries. If they aren’t, they may meanthat Randolph Carter has been brought under the control of people with no good purpose. There’sonly one thing to do—have this faker arrested. De Marigny, will you telephone for thepolice?”

“Let us wait”, answered their host. “I do not think thiscase calls for the police. I have a certain idea. Mr. Aspinwall, this gentleman is a mysticof real attainments. He says he is in the confidence of Randolph Carter. Will it satisfy youif he can answer certain questions which could be answered only by one in such confidence? Iknow 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 akind of automatic way. Aspinwall remained where he was, studying closely the Hindoo who confrontedhim with abnormally impassive face. Suddenly, as Chandraputra clumsily restored the SilverKey to his pocket, the lawyer emitted a guttural shout which stopped de Marigny and Phillipsin their tracks.

“Hey, by God, I’ve got it! This rascal is in disguise. I don’tbelieve 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 turbanand beard hide the edges. This fellow’s a common crook! He isn’t even a foreigner—I’vebeen watching his language. He’s a Yankee of some sort. And look at those mittens—heknows his fingerprints could be spotted. Damn you, I’ll pull that thing off—”

“Stop!” The hoarse, oddly alien voice of the Swami held a tonebeyond all mere earthly fright. “I told you there was another form of proof which Icould give if necessary, and I warned you not to provoke me to it. This red-faced old meddleris right—I’m not really an East Indian. This face is a mask, and what it coversis not human. You others have guessed—I felt that minutes ago. It wouldn’t bepleasant if I took that mask off—let it alone, Ernest. I may as well tell you thatI am Randolph Carter.”

No one moved. Aspinwall snorted and made vague motions. De Marigny and Phillips,across the room, watched the workings of his red face and studied the back of the turbaned figurethat confronted him. The clock’s abnormal ticking was hideous, and the tripod fumes andswaying 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’vereasons of your own for not wanting that mask off. Maybe we’d know who you are. Off withit—”

As he reached forward, the Swami seized his hand with one of his own clumsilymittened members, evoking a curious cry of mixed pain and surprise. De Marigny started towardthe two, but paused confused as the pseudo-Hindoo’s shout of protest changed to a whollyinexplicable rattling and buzzing sound. Aspinwall’s red face was furious, and with hisfree hand he made another lunge at his opponent’s bushy beard. This time he succeededin getting a hold, and at his frantic tug the whole waxen visage came loose from the turbanand clung to the lawyer’s apoplectic fist.

As it did so, Aspinwall uttered a frightful gurgling cry, and Phillips andde Marigny saw his face convulsed with a wilder, deeper, and more hideous epilepsy of starkpanic than ever they had seen on human countenance before. The pseudo-Swami had meanwhile releasedhis 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, fascinatedsort 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 thelawyer’s act had disclosed. Then their attention was turned to Aspinwall, who was sinkingponderously to the floor. The spell was broken—but when they reached the old man he wasdead.

Turning quickly to the shuffling Swami’s receding back, de Marigny sawone of the great white mittens drop listlessly off a dangling arm. The fumes of the olibanumwere 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 restraining handon his shoulder.

“Don’t!” he whispered. “We don’t know what we’reup against—that other facet, you know—Zkauba, the wizard of Yaddith. . . .”

The turbaned figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers sawthrough the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. Thefumbling made a queer clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulledthe door shut after it.

De Marigny could no longer be restrained, but when he reached and opened theclock it was empty. The abnormal ticking went on, beating out the dark cosmic rhythm which underliesall mystical gate-openings. On the floor the great white mitten, and the dead man with a beardedmask clutched in his hand, had nothing further to reveal.

A year has 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 variousmystics in 1930-31-32 was indeed tenanted by a strange Hindoo, but he left shortlybefore the date of the New Orleans conference and has never been seen since. He was said tobe dark, expressionless, and bearded, and his landlord thinks the swarthy mask—which wasduly exhibited—looks very much like him. He was never, however, suspected of any connexionwith the nightmare apparitions whispered of by local Slavs. The hills behind Arkham were searchedfor the “metal envelope”, but nothing of the sort was ever found. However, a clerkin Arkham’s First National Bank does recall a queer turbaned man who cashed an odd bitof gold bullion in October, 1930.

De Marigny and Phillips scarcely know what to make of the business. Afterall, what was proved? There was a story. There was a key which might have been forged from oneof 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 theolibanum 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 designson Randolph Carter’s estate. But the autopsy said that Aspinwall had died of shock. Wasit 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 rhythmof that hieroglyphed, coffin-shaped clock.

I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionallytitanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greaternumber of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections ofour waking experiences—Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism—there arestill a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permits of no ordinary interpretation,and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphereof mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by anall but impassable barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrialconsciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different naturefrom the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger afterwaking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. Wemay guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are notnecessarily 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 presenceon the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

It was from a youthful reverie filled with speculations of this sort that Iarose one afternoon in the winter of 1900-1901, when to the state psychopathic institutionin which I served as an interne was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me sounceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his appearancewas that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellentscions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in thehilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaricdegeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settleddistricts. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of “whitetrash” in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental statusis probably below that of any other section of the native American people.

Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four statepolicemen, and who was described as a highly dangerous character, certainly presented no evidenceof his perilous disposition when first I beheld him. Though well above the middle stature, andof 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 growthof yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age was unknown, sinceamong his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties exist; but from the baldnessof his head in front, and from the decayed condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote himdown as a man of about forty.

From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gatheredof his case. This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyesof his primitive associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, andupon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear evenin 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 ofhis 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 afterawakening would forget all that he had said, or at least all that had caused him to say whathe 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 graduallyincreased in frequency and violence; till about a month before his arrival at the institutionhad 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, theman had roused himself most suddenly; with ululations so horrible and unearthly that they broughtseveral neighbours to his cabin—a filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as indescribableas himself. Rushing out into the snow, he had flung his arms aloft and commenced a series ofleaps 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 andfury, screaming of his desire and need to find and kill a certain “thing that shines andshakes and laughs”. At length, after temporarily felling one of his detainers with a suddenblow, he had flung himself upon the other in a daemoniac ecstasy of bloodthirstiness, shriekingfiendishly that he would “jump high in the air and burn his way through anything thatstopped him”. Family and neighbours had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageousof them returned, Slater was gone, leaving behind an unrecognisable pulp-like thing that hadbeen a living man but an hour before. None of the mountaineers had dared to pursue him, andit is likely that they would have welcomed his death from the cold; but when several morningslater they heard his screams from a distant ravine, they realised that he had somehow managedto survive, and that his removal in one way or another would be necessary. Then had followedan armed searching party, whose purpose (whatever it may have been originally) became that ofa 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, andtaken to the nearest gaol; 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 afterdrinking much liquor. He had awaked to find himself standing bloody-handed in the snow beforehis cabin, the mangled corpse of his neighbour Peter Slader at his feet. Horrified, he had takento the woods in a vague effort to escape from the scene of what must have been his crime. Beyondthese things he seemed to know nothing, nor could the expert questioning of his interrogatorsbring out a single additional fact. That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning hewakened with no singular feature save a certain alteration of expression. Dr. Barnard, who hadbeen watching the patient, thought he noticed in the pale blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiarquality; 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 onlyreiterated 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 combinedefforts of four men were needed to bind him in a strait-jacket. The alienists listened withkeen attention to his words, since their curiosity had been aroused to a high pitch by the suggestiveyet mostly conflicting and incoherent stories of his family and neighbours. Slater raved forupward of fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of great edifices of light, oceansof space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of all did he dwell uponsome mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at him. This vast, vague personalityseemed to have done him a terrible wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramountdesire. In order to reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burningevery obstacle that stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse, until with the greatest suddennesshe ceased. The fire of madness died from his eyes, and in dull wonder he looked at his questionersand asked why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled the leathern harness and did not restore ittill night, when he succeeded in persuading Slater to don it of his own volition, for his owngood. 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 learnedlittle. On the source of Slater’s visions they speculated at length, for sincehe could neither read nor write, and had apparently never heard a legend or fairy tale, hisgorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable. That it could not come from any known myth or romancewas made especially clear by the fact that the unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only inhis own simple manner. He raved of things he did not understand and could not interpret; thingswhich he claimed to have experienced, but which he could not have learned through any normalor connected narration. The alienists soon agreed that abnormal dreams were the foundation ofthe trouble; dreams whose vividness could for a time completely dominate the waking mind ofthis basically inferior man. With due formality Slater was tried for murder, acquitted on theground 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 fromthis you may judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patientas soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case. He seemed to sense a certain friendlinessin me; born no doubt of the interest I could not conceal, and the gentle manner in which I questionedhim. Not that he ever recognised me during his attacks, when I hung breathlessly upon his chaoticbut cosmic word-pictures; but he knew me in his quiet hours, when he would sit by his barredwindow weaving baskets of straw and willow, and perhaps pining for the mountain freedom he couldnever enjoy again. His family never called to see him; probably it had found another temporaryhead, after the manner of decadent mountain folk.

By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantasticconceptions of Joe Slater. The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike;but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous and disjointed jargon, wereassuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive. How, I oftenasked myself, could the stolid imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whosevery possession argued a lurking spark of genius? How could any backwoods dullard have gainedso much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slaterranted in his furious delirium? More and more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personalitywho cringed before me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; somethinginfinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative medical andscientific colleagues.

And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my investigationwas, that in a kind of semi-uncorporeal dream life Slater wandered or floated through resplendentand prodigious valleys, meadows, gardens, cities, and palaces of light; in a region unboundedand unknown to man. That there he was no peasant or degenerate, but a creature of importanceand vivid life; moving proudly and dominantly, and checked only by a certain deadly enemy, whoseemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal structure, and who did not appear to be of humanshape, since Slater never referred to it as a man, or as aught save a thing. Thisthing had done Slater some hideous but unnamed wrong, which the maniac (if maniac hewere) yearned to avenge. From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judgedthat he and the luminous thing had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence theman was himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy. This impression was sustainedby his frequent references to flying through space and burning all that impededhis progress. Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic words wholly inadequate to conveythem, a circ*mstance which drove me to the conclusion that if a true dream-world indeed existed,oral language was not its medium for the transmission of thought. Could it be that the dream-soulinhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which the simple andhalting tongue of dulness could not utter? Could it be that I was face to face with intellectualemanations which would explain the mystery if I could but learn to discover and read them? Idid not tell the older physicians of these things, for middle age is sceptical, cynical, anddisinclined to accept new ideas. Besides, the head of the institution had but lately warnedme 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 atomicor molecular motion, convertible into ether waves of radiant energy like heat, light, and electricity.This belief had early led me to contemplate the possibility of telepathy or mental communicationby means of suitable apparatus, and I had in my college days prepared a set of transmittingand receiving instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless telegraphyat that crude, pre-radio period. These I had tested with a fellow-student; but achieving noresult, 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 instrumentsagain; and spent several days in repairing them for action. When they were complete once moreI missed no opportunity for their trial. At each outburst of Slater’s violence, I wouldfit the transmitter to his forehead and the receiver to my own; constantly making delicate adjustmentsfor various hypothetical wave-lengths of intellectual energy. I had but little notion of howthe thought-impressions would, if successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent response in mybrain; but I felt certain that I could detect and interpret them. Accordingly I continued myexperiments, though informing no one of their nature.

It was on the twenty-first of February, 1901, that the thing finally occurred. As I look backacross the years I realise how unreal it seems; and sometimes half wonder if old Dr. Fentonwas not right when he charged it all to my excited imagination. I recall that he listened withgreat kindness and patience when I told him, but afterward gave me a nerve-powder and arrangedfor the half-year’s vacation on which I departed the next week. That fateful night I waswildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the excellent care he had received, Joe Slater wasunmistakably dying. Perhaps it was his mountain freedom that he missed, or perhaps the turmoilin his brain had grown too acute for his rather sluggish physique; but at all events the flameof vitality flickered low in the decadent body. He was drowsy near the end, and as darknessfell he dropped off into a troubled sleep. I did not strap on the strait-jacket as was customarywhen he slept, since I saw that he was too feeble to be dangerous, even if he woke in mentaldisorder once more before passing away. But I did place upon his head and mine the two endsof my cosmic “radio”; hoping against hope for a first and last message from thedream-world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse, a mediocre fellowwho did not understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think to inquire into my course. Asthe 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 littlelater.

The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, andharmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand; while on my ravished sight burst the stupendousspectacle of ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves of living fire blazed effulgentlyaround the spot where I seemed to float in air; extending upward to an infinitely high vaulteddome of indescribable splendour. Blending with this display of palatial magnificence, or rather,supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide plains and gracefulvalleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes; covered with every lovely attribute of scenerywhich my delighted eye could conceive of, yet formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal, plasticentity, which in consistency partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceivedthat my own brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appearedto me, was the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this elysian realm I dweltnot as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar to me; just as it had been for uncountedaeons of eternity before, and would be for like eternities to come.

Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquywith me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of approachingtriumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage; escapingforever, 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 floatedthus for a little time, when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the objects aroundus, as though some force were recalling me to earth—where I least wished to go. The formnear 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 thanthat of the other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the luminousone and I were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it would be the lasttime. The sorry planet-shell being well-nigh spent, in less than an hour my fellow would befree to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the hither stars to the very confinesof infinity.

A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of lightfrom my sudden and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my chair as I saw thedying figure on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was indeed awaking, though probably forthe last time. As I looked more closely, I saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of colourwhich 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 finallybegan to grow tense, and the head turned restlessly with closed eyes. I did not arouse the sleepingnurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged head-bands of my telepathic “radio”,intent to catch any parting message the dreamer might have to deliver. All at once the headturned sharply in my direction and the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in blank amazementat what I beheld. The man who had been Joe Slater, the Catskill decadent, was now gazing atme with a pair of luminous, expanded eyes whose blue seemed subtly to have deepened. Neithermania nor degeneracy was visible in that gaze, and I felt beyond a doubt that I was viewinga face behind which lay an active mind of high order.

At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operatingupon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly, and was rewarded by thepositive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come at last. Each transmittedidea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was employed, my habitual associationof conception and expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinaryEnglish.

“Joe Slater is dead”, came the soul-petrifying voice oragency 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. Hisgross body could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. Hewas too much of an animal, too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you havecome to discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has beenmy torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years. I am an entity like thatwhich you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I am your brother of light, andhave floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your waking earth-selfof your real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages. Next yearI may be dwelling in the dark Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan-Chanwhich is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reelabout the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudlyover the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth-self know of life and its extent!How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquillity! Of the oppressor I cannot speak.You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence—you who without knowing idly gaveto its blinking beacon the name of Algol, the Daemon-Star. It is to meet and conquerthe oppressor that I have vainly striven for aeons, held back by bodily encumbrances. TonightI go as a Nemesis bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky closeby the Daemon-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 friend in the cosmos;you have been my only friend on this planet—the only soul to sense and seek for me withinthe repellent form which lies on this couch. We shall meet again—perhaps in the shiningmists of Orion’s Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia. Perhaps in unremembereddreams tonight; perhaps in some other form an aeon hence, when the solar system shall have beenswept away.”

At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, and the pale eyes of the dreamer—orcan I say dead man?—commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor I crossed over to thecouch and felt of his wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and pulseless. The sallow cheeks paledagain, and the thick lips fell open, disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerateJoe Slater. I shivered, pulled a blanket over the hideous face, and awakened the nurse. ThenI left the cell and went silently to my room. I had an insistent and unaccountable craving fora 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 themas you will. As I have already admitted, my superior, old Dr. Fenton, denies the reality ofeverything I have related. He vows that I was broken down with nervous strain, and badly inneed of the long vacation on full pay which he so generously gave me. He assures me on his professionalhonour that Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions must have comefrom the crude hereditary folk-tales which circulate 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 Slaterdied. Lest you think me a biassed witness, another’s pen must add this final testimony,which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the starNova Persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Prof. GarrettP. Serviss:

I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if youwill; 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 toldwith 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 nebulousnature of the horrors which brought it upon me.

Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren; though I think—almosthope—that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is truethat I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researchesinto the unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witnessof yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainesville pike, walking toward Big CypressSwamp, at half past eleven on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, anda curious coil of wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all playeda part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my shaken recollection. But ofwhat 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 tome that there is nothing in the swamp or near it which could form the setting of that frightfulepisode. I reply that I know nothing beyond what I saw. Vision or nightmare it may have been—visionor nightmare I fervently hope it was—yet it is all that my mind retains of what took placein 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 tome, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbiddensubjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these arefew 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 hispocket out of the world—was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warrenwould never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our studies—must Isay again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather merciful that Ido not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more through reluctant fascination thanthrough actual inclination. Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him. I rememberhow I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the awful happening, when he talkedso incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in theirtombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrorsbeyond 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 ancientbook in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a month before—butI swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find. Your witness says he saw us at halfpast eleven on the Gainesville pike, headed for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, butI have no distinct memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene only, and thehour must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporousheavens.

The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifoldsigns of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, andcurious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdlywith rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed hauntedby the notion that Warren and I were the first living creatures to invade a lethal silence ofcenturies. Over the valley’s rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisomevapours that seemed to emanate from unheard-of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beamsI could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades;all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxurianceof the unhealthy vegetation. My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolisconcerns the act of pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulchre, and ofthrowing down some burdens which we seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I hadwith me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a similarlantern and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the spot and the task seemedknown 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, whichconsisted of three immense granite slabs, we stepped back some distance to survey the charnelscene; and Warren appeared to make some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulchre,and using his spade as a lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin whichmay 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 effluenceof miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however, weapproached the pit again, and found the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns disclosedthe top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth,and bordered by moist walls encrusted with nitre. And now for the first time my memory recordsverbal discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice singularlyunperturbed by our awesome surroundings.

“I’m sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface”, hesaid, “but it would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. Youcan’t imagine, even from what you have read and from what I’ve told you, the thingsI shall have to see and do. It’s fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if any man withoutironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don’t wishto offend you, and heaven knows I’d be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibilityis in a certain sense mine, and I couldn’t drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probabledeath or madness. I tell you, you can’t imagine what the thing is really like! But I promiseto keep you informed over the telephone of every move—you see I’ve enough wire hereto reach to the centre of the earth and back!”

I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remembermy remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchraldepths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to abandon the expeditionif I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he alone held the key to thething. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner of thingwe sought. After he had secured my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up thereel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myselfupon an aged, discoloured gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook myhand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary. For amoment I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laidit down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircasehad been encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to theunknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the strugglingbeams of that waning crescent moon.

In the lone silence of that hoary and deserted city of the dead, my mind conceivedthe most ghastly phantasies and illusions; and the grotesque shrines and monoliths seemed toassume a hideous personality—a half-sentience. Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in thedarker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial processionpast the portals of the mouldering tombs in the hillside; shadows which could not have beencast by that pallid, peering crescent moon. I constantly consulted my watch by the light ofmy electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; butfor 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 unpreparedfor the words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering thanany 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 tonesagain:

“Carter, it’s terrible—monstrous—unbelievable!”

This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a floodof 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 apparentlytinged with despair:

“I can’t tell you, Carter! It’s too utterly beyond thought—Idare 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 ofWarren in a pitch of wilder consternation:

“Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of thisif you can! Quick!—leave everything else and make for the outside—it’s youronly 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 thetombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the humanimagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vagueresentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such circ*mstances. 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 unleashedmy 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—andmy own fault. Put back the slab and run—there’s nothing else you or anyone can donow!” The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopelessresignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.

“Quick—before it’s too late!” I tried not toheed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to rush downto 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 thosedamned steps and run for your life—you’re losing time— So long, Carter—won’tsee you again.” Here Warren’s whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that graduallyrose 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 aeons I sat stupefied;whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through thoseaeons 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 aeons seemed to elapse after Warrenshrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideoussilence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my earsto listen. Again I called down, “Warren, are you there?”, and in answer heard thething which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to accountfor that thing —that voice—nor can I venture to describe it in detail, sincethe first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the timeof 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 theend of my story. I heard it, and knew no more. Heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemeteryin the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and themiasmal vapours. Heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulchreas I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon. And thisis what it said:

In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with hisstreaked cat in Gray’s Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad. His room is filled withbooks of the tamest and most puerile kind, and hour after hour he tries to lose himself in theirfeeble pages. All he seeks from life is not to think. For some reason thought is very horribleto him, and anything which stirs the imagination he flees as a plague. He is very thin and greyand wrinkled, but there are those who declare he is not nearly so old as he looks. Fear hasits grisly claws upon him, and a sound will make him start with staring eyes and sweat-beadedforehead. Friends and companions he shuns, for he wishes to answer no questions. Those who onceknew him as scholar and aesthete say it is very pitiful to see him now. He dropped them allyears ago, and no one feels sure whether he left the country or merely sank from sight in somehidden byway. It is a decade now since he moved into Gray’s Inn, and of where he had beenhe 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 ancienthouse he felt a strangeness and a breath of cosmic wind about the grey wizened man in the nextroom. He forced his friendship where old friends dared not force theirs, and marvelled at thefright that sat upon this gaunt, haggard watcher and listener. For that the man always watchedand listened no one could doubt. He watched and listened with his mind more than with his eyesand ears, and strove every moment to drown something in his ceaseless poring over gay, insipidnovels. And when the church bells rang he would stop his ears and scream, and the grey cat thatdwelt 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 anythingprofound or hidden. The old man would not live up to his aspect and manner, but would feigna smile and a light tone and prattle feverishly and frantically of cheerful trifles; his voiceevery 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; andWilliams was not surprised to hear that he had been to Harrow and Oxford. Later it developedthat he was none other than Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle on the Yorkshirecoast so many odd things were told; but when Williams tried to talk of the castle, and of itsreputed Roman origin, he refused to admit that there was anything unusual about it. He eventittered shrilly when the subject of the supposed under crypts, hewn out of the solid crag thatfrowns on the North Sea, was brought up.

So matters went till that night when Williams brought home the infamousNecronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the dreaded volume since hissixteenth year, when his dawning love of the bizarre had led him to ask queer questions of abent old bookseller in Chandos Street; and he had always wondered why men paled when they spokeof it. The old bookseller had told him that only five copies were known to have survived theshocked edicts of the priests and lawgivers against it and that all of these were locked upwith 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 ludicrouslylow figure. It was at a Jew’s shop in the squalid precincts of Clare Market, where hehad often bought strange things before, and he almost fancied the gnarled old Levite smiledamidst tangles of beard as the great discovery was made. The bulky leather cover with the brassclasp 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 disquietingrecollections in his brain. He felt it was highly necessary to get the ponderous thing homeand begin deciphering it, and bore it out of the shop with such precipitate haste that the oldJew chuckled disturbingly behind him. But when at last it was safe in his room he found thecombination of black-letter and debased idiom too much for his powers as a linguist, and reluctantlycalled on his strange, frightened friend for help with the twisted, mediaeval Latin. Lord Northamwas 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 thetitle. It was when he regained his senses that he told his story; told his fantastic figmentof madness in frantic whispers, lest his friend be not quick to burn the accursed book and givewide 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 nineteenthBaron of a line whose beginnings went uncomfortably far back into the past—unbelievablyfar, if vague tradition could be heeded, for there were family tales of a descent from pre-Saxontimes, when a certain Cnaeus Gabinius Capito, military tribune in the Third Augustan Legionthen stationed at Lindum in Roman Britain, had been summarily expelled from his command forparticipation in certain rites unconnected with any known religion. Gabinius had, the rumourran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign inthe dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survivefrom a great land in the west that had sunk, leaving only the islands with the raths and circlesand shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest. There was no certainty, of course, in thelegend that Gabinius had built an impregnable fortress over the forbidden cave and founded aline which Pict and Saxon, Dane and Norman were powerless to obliterate; or in the tacit assumptionthat from this line sprang the bold companion and lieutenant of the Black Prince whom EdwardThird created Baron of Northam. These things were not certain, yet they were often told; andin truth the stonework of Northam Keep did look alarmingly like the masonry of Hadrian’sWall. As a child Lord Northam had had peculiar dreams when sleeping in the older parts of thecastle, and had acquired a constant habit of looking back through his memory for half-amorphousscenes and patterns and impressions which formed no part of his waking experience. He becamea dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying; a searcher for strange realms and relationshipsonce 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 vastand ominous, and that unknown demesnes press on and permeate the sphere of the known at everypoint, Northam in youth and young manhood drained in turn the founts of formal religion andoccult mystery. Nowhere, however, could he find ease and content; and as he grew older the stalenessand limitations of life became more and more maddening to him. During the ’nineties hedabbled in Satanism, and at all times he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which seemedto promise escape from the close vistas of science and the dully unvarying laws of Nature. Bookslike Ignatius Donnelly’s chimerical account of Atlantis he absorbed with zest, and a dozenobscure precursors of Charles Fort enthralled him with their vagaries. He would travel leaguesto follow up a furtive village tale of abnormal wonder, and once went into the desert of Arabyto seek a Nameless City of faint report, which no man has ever beheld. There rose within himthe tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one found would admit himfreely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly at the back of his memory. It mightbe in the visible world, yet it might be only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held within hisown half-explored brain that cryptic link which would awaken him to elder and future lives inforgotten dimensions; which would bind him to the stars, and to the infinities and eternitiesbeyond them.

Of the events which took place at the Norton Mine on October 18th and 19th,1894, I have no desire to speak. A sense of duty to science is all that impels me to recall,in these last years of my life, scenes and happenings fraught with a terror doubly acute becauseI cannot wholly define it. But I believe that before I die I should tell what I know of the—shallI say transition—of Juan Romero.

My name and origin need not be related to posterity; in fact, I fancy it isbetter 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-beardednative teachers than amongst my brother-officers. I had delved not a little into odd Easternlore when overtaken by the calamities which brought about my new life in America’s vastWest—a life wherein I found it well to accept a name—my present one—whichis very common and carries no meaning.

In the summer and autumn of 1894 I dwelt in the drear expanses of the CactusMountains, employed as a common labourer at the celebrated Norton Mine; whose discovery by anaged prospector some years before had turned the surrounding region from a nearly unpeopledwaste to a seething cauldron of sordid life. A cavern of gold, lying deep below a mountain lake,had enriched its venerable finder beyond his wildest dreams, and now formed the seat of extensivetunnelling operations on the part of the corporation to which it had finally been sold. Additionalgrottoes had been found, and the yield of yellow metal was exceedingly great; so that a mightyand 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 titanicmining enterprise. 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 theNorton Mine. One of a large herd of unkempt Mexicans attracted thither from the neighbouringcountry, he at first commanded attention only because of his features; which though plainlyof 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. Itis 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 conquistadoror the American pioneer, but the ancient and noble Aztec, whom imagination called to view whenthe silent peon would rise in the early morning and gaze in fascination at the sun as it creptabove the eastern hills, meanwhile stretching out his arms to the orb as if in the performanceof some rite whose nature he did not himself comprehend. But save for his face, Romero was notin any way suggestive of nobility. Ignorant and dirty, he was at home amongst the other brown-skinnedMexicans; having come (so I was afterward told) from the very lowest sort of surroundings. Hehad been found as a child in a crude mountain hut, the only survivor of an epidemic which hadstalked 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 recalledtheir identity, and they were soon forgotten by the many. Indeed, the crumbling of the adobehut and the closing of the rock fissure by a subsequent avalanche had helped to efface eventhe scene from recollection. Reared by a Mexican cattle-thief who had given him his name, Juandiffered little from his fellows.

The attachment which Romero manifested toward me was undoubtedly commencedthrough the quaint and ancient Hindoo ring which I wore when not engaged in active labour. Ofits nature, and manner of coming into my possession, I cannot speak. It was my last link witha chapter of life forever closed, and I valued it highly. Soon I observed that the odd-lookingMexican was likewise interested; eyeing it with an expression that banished all suspicion ofmere covetousness. Its hoary hieroglyphs seemed to stir some faint recollection in his untutoredbut active mind, though he could not possibly have beheld their like before. Within a few weeksafter his advent, Romero was like a faithful servant to me; this notwithstanding the fact thatI was myself but an ordinary miner. Our conversation was necessarily limited. He knew but afew words of English, while I found my Oxonian Spanish was something quite different from thepatois of the peon of New Spain.

The event which I am about to relate was unheralded by long premonitions. Thoughthe man Romero had interested me, and though my ring had affected him peculiarly, I think thatneither of us had any expectation of what was to follow when the great blast was set off. Geologicalconsiderations had dictated an extension of the mine directly downward from the deepest partof the subterranean area; and the belief of the Superintendent that only solid rock would beencountered, had led to the placing of a prodigious charge of dynamite. With this work Romeroand I were not connected, wherefore our first knowledge of extraordinary conditions came fromothers. The charge, heavier perhaps than had been estimated, had seemed to shake the entiremountain. Windows in shanties on the slope outside were shattered by the shock, whilst minersthroughout the nearer passages were knocked from their feet. Jewel Lake, which lay above thescene of action, heaved as in a tempest. Upon investigation it was seen that a new abyss yawnedindefinitely below the seat of the blast; an abyss so monstrous that no handy line might fathomit, 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 cessationtill a bottom might be discovered.

Shortly afterward the pale-faced workmen apprised the Superintendent of theirfailure. Firmly though respectfully they signified their refusal to revisit the chasm, or indeedto work further in the mine until it might be sealed. Something beyond their experience wasevidently 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 many plans forthe 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 in answer; either to the coyote—or to somethingelse. A storm was gathering around the peaks of the range, and weirdly shaped clouds scuddedhorribly across the blurred patch of celestial light which marked a gibbous moon’s attemptsto shine through many layers of cirro-stratus vapours. It was Romero’s voice, coming fromthe bunk above, that awakened me; a voice excited and tense with some vague expectation I couldnot 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 exceedinglyfaint, yet dominated even the dog, the coyote, and the increasing tempest. To seek to describeit were useless—for it was such that no description is possible. Perhaps it was like thepulsing of the engines far down in a great liner, as sensed from the deck, yet it was not somechanical; not so devoid of the element of life and consciousness. Of all its qualities,remoteness in the earth most impressed me. To my mind rushed fragments of a passage in JosephGlanvill 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 strangering on my hand, which glistened queerly in every flash of lightning, and then staring intentlyin the direction of the mine shaft. I also rose, and both stood motionless for a time, strainingour ears as the uncanny rhythm seemed more and more to take on a vital quality. Then withoutapparent volition we began to move toward the door, whose rattling in the gale held a comfortingsuggestion of earthly reality. The chanting in the depths—for such the sound now seemedto be—grew in volume and distinctness; and we felt irresistibly urged out into the stormand thence to the gaping blackness of the shaft.

We encountered no living creature, for the men of the night shift had beenreleased from duty, and were doubtless at the Dry Gulch settlement pouring sinister rumoursinto the ear of some drowsy bartender. From the watchman’s cabin, however, gleamed a smallsquare of yellow light like a guardian eye. I dimly wondered how the rhythmic sound had affectedthe watchman; but Romero was moving more swiftly now, and I followed without pausing.

As we descended the shaft, the sound beneath grew definitely composite. Itstruck me as horribly like a sort of Oriental ceremony, with beating of drums and chanting ofmany voices. I have, as you are aware, been much in India. Romero and I moved without materialhesitancy through drifts and down ladders; ever toward the thing that allured us, yet ever witha pitifully helpless fear and reluctance. At one time I fancied I had gone mad—this waswhen, on wondering how our way was lighted in the absence of lamp or candle, I realised thatthe ancient ring on my finger was glowing with eerie radiance, diffusing a pallid lustre throughthe damp, heavy air around.

It was without warning that Romero, after clambering down one of the many rudeladders, 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 startling fashion; and with a wild outcryhe 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 perception to note that his speech, when articulate,was not of any sort known to me. Harsh but impressive polysyllables had replaced the customarymixture 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—andshuddered when the association came to me.

The climax of that awful night was composite but fairly brief, beginning justas I reached the final cavern of the journey. Out of the darkness immediately ahead burst afinal shriek from the Mexican, which was joined by such a chorus of uncouth sound as I couldnever hear again and survive. In that moment it seemed as if all the hidden terrors and monstrositiesof earth had become articulate in an effort to overwhelm the human race. Simultaneously thelight from my ring was extinguished, and I saw a new light glimmering from lower space but afew yards ahead of me. I had arrived at the abyss, which was now redly aglow, and which hadevidently swallowed up the unfortunate Romero. Advancing, I peered over the edge of that chasmwhich no line could fathom, and which was now a pandemonium of flickering flame and hideousuproar. At first I beheld nothing but a seething blur of luminosity; but then shapes, all infinitelydistant, began to detach themselves from the confusion, and I saw—was it Juan Romero?— butGod! I dare not tell you what I saw! . . . Some power from heaven, coming to myaid, obliterated both sights and sounds in such a crash as may be heard when two universes collidein space. Chaos supervened, and I knew the peace of oblivion.

I hardly know how to continue, since conditions so singular are involved; butI will do my best, not even trying to differentiate betwixt the real and the apparent. WhenI awaked, I was safe in my bunk and the red glow of dawn was visible at the window. Some distanceaway the lifeless body of Juan Romero lay upon a table, surrounded by a group of men, includingthe 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 struckand shaken the mountain. No direct cause was evident, and an autopsy failed to shew any reasonwhy Romero should not be living. Snatches of conversation indicated beyond a doubt that neitherRomero nor I had left the bunkhouse during the night; that neither had been awake during thefrightful storm which had passed over the Cactus range. That storm, said men who had ventureddown the mine shaft, had caused extensive caving in, and had completely closed the deep abysswhich had created so much apprehension the day before. When I asked the watchman what soundshe had heard prior to the mighty thunderbolt, he mentioned a coyote, a dog, and the snarlingmountain wind—nothing more. Nor do I doubt his word.

Upon the resumption of work Superintendent Arthur called on some especiallydependable men to make a few investigations around the spot where the gulf had appeared. Thoughhardly eager, they obeyed; and a deep boring was made. Results were very curious. The roof ofthe void, as seen whilst it was open, was not by any means thick; yet now the drills of theinvestigators 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 occasionallysteals over his countenance as he sits thinking at his desk.

One other thing is curious. Shortly after waking on that morning after thestorm, I noticed the unaccountable absence of my Hindoo ring from my finger. I had prized itgreatly, yet nevertheless felt a sensation of relief at its disappearance. If one of my fellow-minersappropriated it, he must have been quite clever in disposing of his booty, for despite advertisem*ntsand a police search the ring was never seen again. Somehow I doubt if it was stolen by mortalhands, 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 inthe autumn, about two in the morning when winds and animals howl dismally, there comes frominconceivable depths below a damnable suggestion of rhythmical throbbing . . .and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed.

Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quinceyand the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art whichmakes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror, and the mystery of thoseobscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no manhas yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at thedirection of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of thedrug is so irresistibly borne. De Quincey was drawn back into Asia, that teeming land of nebulousshadows whose hideous antiquity is so impressive that “the vast age of the race and nameoverpowers the sense of youth in the individual”, but farther than that he dared not go. Thosewho have gone farther seldom returned; and even when they have, they have been either silentor quite mad. I took opium but once—in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deadenthe agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose—my physician was worn out with horrorand exertion—and I travelled very far indeed. In the end I returned and lived, but my nightsare 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 wasadministered. 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 oftransition, but I think the effect must have begun shortly before the pounding ceased to bepainful. As I have said, there was an overdose; so my reactions were probably far from normal. Thesensation of falling, curiously dissociated from the idea of gravity or direction, was paramount;though there was a subsidiary impression of unseen throngs in incalculable profusion, throngs ofinfinitely diverse nature, but all more or less related to me. Sometimes it seemed less as thoughI were falling, than as though the universe or the ages were falling past me. Suddenly my painceased, and I began to associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force. Thefalling had ceased also, giving place to a sensation of uneasy, temporary rest; and when I listenedclosely, I fancied the pounding was that of the vast, inscrutable sea as its sinister, colossalbreakers lacerated some desolate shore after a storm of titanic magnitude. Then I opened myeyes.

For a moment my surroundings seemed confused, like a projected image hopelesslyout of focus, but gradually I realised my solitary presence in a strange and beautiful room lightedby many windows. Of the exact nature of the apartment I could form no idea, for my thoughts werestill far from settled; but I noticed vari-coloured rugs and draperies, elaborately fashionedtables, chairs, ottomans, and divans, and delicate vases and ornaments which conveyed a suggestionof the exotic without being actually alien. These things I noticed, yet they were not longuppermost in my mind. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness, and rising above everyother impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could notanalyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace—not death, but somenameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.

Presently I realised that the direct symbol and excitant of my fear was thehideous pounding whose incessant reverberations throbbed maddeningly against my exhausted brain. Itseemed to come from a point outside and below the edifice in which I stood, and to associate itselfwith the most terrifying mental images. I felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond thesilk-hung walls, and shrank from glancing through the arched, latticed windows that opened sobewilderingly 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 onone of the small tables, I lit the many candles reposing about the walls in Arabesque sconces. Theadded sense of security brought by closed shutters and artificial light calmed my nerves to somedegree, but I could not shut out the monotonous pounding. Now that I was calmer, the sound becameas fascinating as it was fearful, and I felt a contradictory desire to seek out its source despitemy still powerful shrinking. Opening a portiere at the side of the room nearest the pounding, Ibeheld a small and richly draped corridor ending in a carven door and large oriel window. To thiswindow I was irresistibly drawn, though my ill-defined apprehensions seemed almost equally bent onholding me back. As I approached it I could see a chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then, asI attained it and glanced out on all sides, the stupendous picture of my surroundings burst upon mewith full and devastating force.

I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person canhave seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building stood on a narrowpoint of land—or what was now a narrow point of land—fully 300 feet above whatmust lately have been a seething vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell anewly washed-out precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling infrightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation. Out a mile or more thererose and fell menacing breakers at least fifty feet in height, and on the far horizon ghoulishblack clouds of grotesque contour were resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waveswere dark and purplish, almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if withuncouth, greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war ofextermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted by the angry sky.

Recovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle hadthrown me, I realised that my actual physical danger was acute. Even whilst I gazed the bank hadlost many feet, and it could not be long before the house would fall undermined into the awful pitof 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 ofthe strange region about me, and marked a singular division which seemed to exist in the hostileocean and firmament. On each side of the jutting promontory different conditions held sway. At myleft as I faced inland was a gently heaving sea with great green waves rolling peacefully in undera brightly shining sun. Something about that sun’s nature and position made me shudder, but Icould not then tell, and cannot tell now, what it was. At my right also was the sea, but it wasblue, calm, and only gently undulating, while the sky above it was darker and the washed-out bankmore nearly white than reddish.

I now turned my attention to the land, and found occasion for fresh surprise; forthe vegetation resembled nothing I had ever seen or read about. It was apparently tropical or atleast sub-tropical—a conclusion borne out by the intense heat of the air. Sometimes I thoughtI could trace strange analogies with the flora of my native land, fancying that the well-knownplants and shrubs might assume such forms under a radical change of climate; but the gigantic andomnipresent palm trees were plainly foreign. The house I had just left was very small—hardlymore than a cottage—but its material was evidently marble, and its architecture was weird andcomposite, involving a quaint fusion of Western and Eastern forms. At the corners were Corinthiancolumns, but the red tile roof was like that of a Chinese pagoda. From the door inland therestretched a path of singularly white sand, about four feet wide, and lined on either side withstately palms and unidentifiable flowering shrubs and plants. It lay toward the side of thepromontory where the sea was blue and the bank rather whitish. Down this path I felt impelled toflee, as if pursued by some malignant spirit from the pounding ocean. At first it was slightlyuphill, then I reached a gentle crest. Behind me I saw the scene I had left; the entire point withthe cottage and the black water, with the green sea on one side and the blue sea on the other, anda curse unnamed and unnamable lowering over all. I never saw it again, and oftenwonder. . . . After this last look I strode ahead and surveyed the inland panoramabefore 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 coveredwith a swaying growth of tropical grass higher than my head. Almost at the limit of vision was acolossal palm tree which seemed to fascinate and beckon me. By this time wonder and escape from theimperilled 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 dangerseized me. Some terror in the swishing tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically poundingsea, 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 classicalstory of tigers which I had read; I strove to recall the author, but had difficulty. Then in themidst of my fear I remembered that the tale was by Rudyard Kipling; nor did the grotesqueness ofdeeming him an ancient author occur to me. I wished for the volume containing this story, and hadalmost started back toward the doomed cottage to procure it when my better sense and the lure ofthe palm prevented me.

Whether or not I could have resisted the backward beckoning without thecounter-fascination of the vast palm tree, I do not know. This attraction was now dominant, and Ileft the path and crawled on hands and knees down the valley’s slope despite my fear of thegrass and of the serpents it might contain. I resolved to fight for life and reason as long aspossible against all menaces of sea or land, though I sometimes feared defeat as the maddeningswish of the uncanny grasses joined the still audible and irritating pounding of the distantbreakers. I would frequently pause and put my hands to my ears for relief, but could never quiteshut out the detestable sound. It was, as it seemed to me, only after ages that I finally draggedmyself to the beckoning palm tree and lay quiet beneath its protecting shade.

There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the oppositeextremes 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 itsbranches a young child of such beauty as I never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this beingbore the features of a faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadowof the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I heard in theupper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent with a sublime and etherealharmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw that anaureola 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, andbeyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe.” As the child spoke, I behelda soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising greeted a pair whom I knew to bethe chief singers among those I had heard. A god and goddess they must have been, for such beautyis not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, “Come, child, you have heard the voices, andall is well. In Teloe beyond the Milky Way and the Arinurian streams are cities all of amber andchalcedony. 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 forblossomy Cytharion of the Seven Suns. And in Teloe and Cytharion abide only youth, beauty, andpleasure, nor are any sounds heard, save of laughter, song, and the lute. Only the gods dwell inTeloe 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 andconsiderably below me. I was obviously floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by thestrange 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 ascendedtogether, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but from the goldennebulae, 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 chaunted mellifluouschoriambics to the accompaniment of lutes, and I felt enveloped in a peace and happiness moreprofound than any I had in life imagined, when the intrusion of a single sound altered my destinyand shattered my soul. Through the ravishing strains of the singers and the lutanists, as if inmocking, daemoniac concord, throbbed from gulfs below the damnable, the detestable pounding of thathideous ocean. And as those black breakers beat their message into my ears I forgot the words ofthe 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 turning, ever turning, with angryand tempestuous seas gnawing at wild desolate shores and dashing foam against the tottering towersof deserted cities. And under a ghastly moon there gleamed sights I can never describe, sights Ican never forget; deserts of corpse-like clay and jungles of ruin and decadence where oncestretched the populous plains and villages of my native land, and maelstroms of frothing oceanwhere once rose the mighty temples of my forefathers. Around the northern pole steamed a morass ofnoisome growths and miasmal vapours, hissing before the onslaught of the ever-mounting waves thatcurled and fretted from the shuddering deep. Then a rending report clave the night, and athwart thedesert of deserts appeared a smoking rift. Still the black ocean foamed and gnawed, eating away thedesert on either side as the rift in the centre 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 theinner earth that are greater than the evil god of waters, but even if it was it could not turnback; and the desert had suffered too much from those nightmare waves to help them now. So theocean ate the last of the land and poured into the smoking gulf, thereby giving up all it had everconquered. From the new-flooded lands it flowed again, uncovering death and decay; and from itsancient and immemorial bed it trickled loathsomely, uncovering nighted secrets of the years whenTime was young and the gods unborn. Above the waves rose weedy, remembered spires. The moon laidpale lilies of light on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified withstar-dust. Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered; terrible spires andmonoliths of lands that men never knew were lands.

There was not any pounding now, but only the unearthly roaring and hissing ofwaters tumbling into the rift. The smoke of that rift had changed to steam, and almost hid theworld as it grew denser and denser. It seared my face and hands, and when I looked to see how itaffected my companions I found they had all disappeared. Then very suddenly it ended, and I knew nomore till I awaked upon a bed of convalescence. As the cloud of steam from the Plutonic gulffinally concealed the entire surface from my sight, all the firmament shrieked at a sudden agony ofmad 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 itsped outward to the void.

And when the smoke cleared away, and I sought to look upon the earth, I beheldagainst the background of cold, humorous stars only the dying sun and the pale mournful planetssearching for their sister.

H.P. Lovecraft has inspired many other writers over the years, leading to the creation of an extended mythos that expands upon the themes,creatures, and cosmic horror elements found in his original works. This extended mythos, while retaining thematic similarities to Lovecraft’s otherworks, often introduces new concepts and settings that do not directly reference the established elements of the Cthulhu Mythos or Dreamlands.Lovecraft’s influence permeates these stories, as his pioneering vision of cosmic dread, and the insignificance of humanity in the face ofincomprehensible forces has become a foundational aspect of modern horror literature.

As H.P. Lovecraft was involved in a literary circle that included other writers such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and AugustDerleth, he co-authored many stories and corresponded with these authors, leading to a shared universe of cosmic horror that has continued to growand evolve over the years. This collaboration and mutual inspiration gave rise to a broader mythos that extends beyond Lovecraft’s solo works,enriching the tapestry of supernatural horror with diverse voices and imaginative expansions. These writers, while bringing their unique stylesand perspectives, adhered to the core principles of Lovecraft’s vision: the fear of the unknown, the fragility of sanity, and the presence ofancient, malevolent entities lurking beyond the veil of reality.

This book contains a selection of stories from the extended mythos that showcase the diverse range of narratives and styles that emerged fromLovecraft’s creative mind and his collaborative circle. Included are tales that delve into the depths of forbidden knowledge, explore unchartedrealms of terror, and present encounters with entities that defy human comprehension. For legal reasons, we have included only those stories thatare in the public domain, ensuring that readers can enjoy these works without any copyright restrictions. Through these stories, readers willexperience the richness of the extended Lovecraft Mythos, a testament to the enduring legacy of H.P. Lovecraft and his profound impact on the genreof horror.

List of stories in the Extended Lovecraft Mythos

“Hello, Bruce. Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age. Come in.”

I threw open the door, and he followed me into the room. His gaunt, ungainlyfigure sprawled awkwardly into the chair I indicated, and he twirled his hat between nervousfingers. His deepset eyes wore a worried, hunted look, and he glanced furtively around the roomas if searching for a hidden something which might unexpectedly pounce upon him. His face washaggard and colorless. The corners of his mouth twitched spasmodically.

“What’s the matter, old man? You look as if you’d seen a ghost. Brace up!”I crossed to the buffet, and poured a small glass of wine from the decanter.“Drink this!”

He downed it with a hasty gulp, and took to toying with his hat again.

“Thanks, Prague-I don’t feel quite myself tonight.”

“You don’t look it, either! What’s wrong?”

Malcolm Bruce shifted uneasily in his chair.

I eyed him in silence for a moment, wondering what could possibly affect theman so strongly. I knew Bruce as a man of steady nerves and iron will. To find him so visiblyupset was, in itself, unusual. I passed cigars, and he selected one, automatically.

It was not until the second cigar had been lighted that Bruce broke the silence.His nervousness was apparently gone. Once more he was the dominant, self-reliant figure I knewof old.

“Prague”, he began, “I’ve just been through the most devilish,gruesome experience that ever befell a man. I don’t know whether I dare tell it or not,for fear you’ll think I’ve gone crazy-and I wouldn’t blame you if you did!But it’s true, every word of it!”

He paused, dramatically, and blew a few rings of smoke in the air.

I smiled. Many a weird tale I had listened to over that self-same table. Theremust have been some kink in my personality that inspired confidence, for I had been told storiesthat some men would have given years of their life to have heard. And yet, despite my love ofthe bizarre and the dangerous, and my longing to explore far reaches of little-known lands,I had been doomed to a life of prosaic, flat, uneventful business.

“Do you happen to have heard of Professor Van Allister?” asked Bruce.

+“You don’t mean Arthur Van Allister?”_

“The same! Then you know him?”

“I should say so! Known him for years. Ever since he resigned as Professorof Chemistry at the College so he could have more time for his experiments. Why, I even helpedhim choose the plans for that sound-proof laboratory of his, on the top floor of his home. Thenhe got so busy with his confounded experiments he couldn’t find time to be chummy!”

“You may recall, Prague, that when we were in college together, I usedto dabble quite a bit in chemistry?”

I nodded, and Bruce continued:

“About four months ago I found myself out of a job. Van Allister advertisedfor an assistant, and I answered. He remembered me from college days, and I managed to convincehim I knew enough about chemistry to warrant a trial.”

“He had a young lady doing his secretarial work-a Miss Marjorie Purdy.She was one of these strict-attention-to-business types, and as good-looking as she was efficient.She had been helping Van Allister a bit in his laboratory, and I soon discovered she took agenuine interest in puttering around, making experiments of her own. Indeed, she spent nearlyall her spare time with us in the laboratory.”

“It was only natural that such companionship should result in a closefriendship, and it wasn’t long before I began to depend on her to help me in difficultexperiments when the Professor was busy. I never could seem to stump her. That girl took tochemistry as a duck takes to water!”

“About two months ago Van Allister had the laboratory partitioned off,and made a separate workroom for himself. He told us that he was about to enter upon a seriesof experiments which, if successful, would bring him everlasting fame. He flatly refused tomake us his confidants in any way, shape, or manner.”

“From that time on, Miss Purdy and I were left alone more and more. Fordays at a time the Professor would retire to the seclusion of his new workshop, sometimes noteven appearing for his meals.”

“That meant, too, that we had more spare time on our hands. Our friendshipripened. I felt a growing admiration for the trim young woman who seemed perfectly content tofuss around smelly bottles and sticky messes, gowned in white from head to foot, even to the rubber glovesshe wore.”

“Day before yesterday Van Allister ïnvited us into his workshop.‘At last I have achieved success’, he announced, holding upfor our inspection a small bottle containing a colorless liquid. ‘I have here what willrank as the greatest chemical discovery ever known. I am going to prove its efficacy right beforeyour eyes. Bruce, will you bring me one of the rabbits, please?’”

“I went back into the other room and brought him one of the rabbits wekept, together with guinea pigs, for experimental purposes.”

“He put the little animal into a small glass box just large enough tohold it, and closed the cover. Then he set a glass funnel in a hole in the top of the box, andwe drew nearer to watch the experiment.”

“He uncorked the bottle, and poised it above the rabbit’s prison.”

‘Now to prove whether my weeks of effort have resulted in successor failure!’

“Slowly, methodically, he emptied the contents of the bottle into thefunnel, and we watched it trickle into the compartment with the frightened animal.”

“Miss Purdy uttered a suppressed cry, and I rubbed my eyes to make surethat they had not deceived me. For, in the case where but a moment before there had been a live,terrified rabbit, there was now nothing but a pile of soft, white ashes!”

“Professor Van Allister turned to us with an air of supreme satisfaction.His face radiated ghoulish glee and his eyes were alight with a weird, insane gleam. When hespoke, his voice took on a tone of mastery.”

‘Bruce-and you, too, Miss Purdy-it has been your privilegeto witness the first successful trial of a preparation that will revolutionize the world. Itwill instantaneously reduce to a fine ash anything with which it comes into contact, exceptglass! Just think what that means. An army equipped with glass bombs filled with my compoundcould annihilate the world! Wood, metal, stone, brick- everything -swept awaybefore them; leaving no more trace than the rabbit I have just experimented upon-just apile of soft, white ashes!’

“I glanced at Miss Purdy. Her face had gone as white as the apron shewore.”

“We watched Van Allister as he transferred all that was left of the bunnyto a small bottle, and neatly labeled it. I’ll admit that I was suffering a mental chillmyself by the time he dismissed me, and we left him alone behind the tightly closed doors ofhis workshop.”

“Once safely outside, Miss Purdy’s nerves gave way completely. Shereeled, and would have fallen had I not caught her in my arms.”

“The feel of her soft, yielding body held close to my own was the laststraw. I cast prudence to the winds and crushed her tightly to my breast. Kiss after kiss Ipressed upon her full red lips, until her eyes opened and I saw the lovelight reflected in them.”

“After a delicious eternity we came back to earth again-long enoughto realize that the laboratory was no place for such ardent demonstrations. At any moment VanAllister might come out of his retreat, and if he should discover our love-making-in hispresent state of mind-we dared not think of what might happen.”

“For the rest of the day I was like a man in a dream. It’s a wonderto me that I succeeded in accomplishing anything at all. My body was merely an automaton, awell-trained machine, going about its appointed tasks, while my mind soared into far-away realmsof delightful day-dreaming.”

“Marjorie kept busy with her secretarial work for the rest of the day,and not once did I lay eyes upon her until my tasks in the laboratory were completed.”

“That night we gave over to the joys of our new-found happiness. Prague,I shall remember that night as long as I live! The happiest moment I have ever known was whenMarjorie Purdy promised to become my wife.”

“Yesterday was another day of unalloyed bliss. All day long my sweetheartand I worked side by side. Then followed another night of love-making. If you’ve neverbeen in love with the only girl in the world, Prague, you can’t understand the deliriousjoy that comes from the very thought of her! And Marjorie returned my devotion a hundred-fold.She gave herself unreservedly into my keeping.”

“Along about noontime, today, I needed something to complete an experiment,and I stepped over to the drug store for it.”

“When I returned I missed Marjorie. I looked for her hat and coat, andthey were gone. The Professor had not shown himself since the experiment upon the rabbit, andwas locked in his workshop.”

“I asked the servants, but none of them had seen her leave the house, nor had she left any message for me.”

“As the afternoon wore on I grew frantic. Evening came, and still no sign of my dear little girl.”

“All thought of work was forgotten. I paced the floor of my room likea caged lion. Every jangle of the ’phone or ring at the door bolstered up my falteringhopes of some word from her, but each time I was doomed to disappointment. Each minute seemedan hour, each hour an eternity!”

“Good God, Prague! You can’t imagine how I suffered! From the heightsof sublime love I mentally plunged to the darkest depths of despair. I conjured visions of allsorts of terrible fates overtaking her. Still, not a word did I hear.”

“It seemed to me that I had lived a lifetime, but my watch told me itwas only half-past seven when the butler told me that Van Allister wanted me in the laboratory.”

“I was in no mood for experiments, but while I was under his roof he wasmy master, and it was for me to obey.”

“The Professor was in his workshop, the door slightly ajar. He calledto me to close the door of the laboratory and join him in the little room.”

“In my present state of mind my brain photographed every minute detailof the scene which met my eyes. In the center of the room, on a marble-top table, was a glasscase about the shape and size of a coffin. It was filled almost to the brim with that same colorlessliquid which the small bottle had contained, two days before.”

“At the left, on a glass-top tabourette, was a newly labeled glass jar.I could not repress an involuntary shudder as I realized that it was filled with soft, whiteashes. Then I saw something that almost made my heart stop beating!”

“On a chair, in a far corner of the workshop, was the hat and coat ofthe girl who had pledged her life to mine-the girl whom I had vowed to cherish and protectwhile life should last!”

“My senses were numbed, my soul surcharged with horror, as realizationflashed over me. There could be but one explanation. The ashes in that jar were the ashesof Marjorie Purdy!”

“The world stood still for one long, terrible moment, and then I wentmad-stark, staring mad!”

“The next I can remember, the Professor and I were locked in a desperatestruggle. Old as he was, he still possessed a strength nearly equal to mine and he had the addedadvantage of calm self-possession.”

“Closer and closer he forced me to the glass coffin. A few moments moreand my ashes would join those of the girl I had loved. I stumbled against the tabourette, andmy fingers closed over the jar of ashes. With one, last, superhuman effort, I raised it highabove my head, and brought it down with crushing force upon the skull of my antagonist! Hisarm relaxed, his limp form dropped in a senseless heap to the floor.”

“Still acting upon impulse, I raised the silent form of the Professorand carefully, lest I should spill some of it on the floor, lowered the body into the casketof death!”

“A moment, and it was over. Professor and liquid, both, were gone, andin their place was a little pile of soft, white ashes!”

“As I gazed at my handiwork the brainstorm passed away, and I came faceto face with the cold, hard truth that I had killed a fellow-being. An unnatural calm possessedme. I knew that there was not a single shred of evidence against me, barring the fact that Iwas the last one known to be alone with the Professor. Nothing remained but ashes!”

“I put on my hat and coat, told the butler that the Professor had leftword he was not to be disturbed, and that I was going out for the evening. Once outside, allmy self-possession vanished. My nerves were shot to pieces. I don’t know where I went-onlythat I wandered aimlessly, here and there, until I found myself outside your apartment justa little while ago.”

“Prague, I felt as if I must talk with someone; that I must unburden mytortured mind. I knew that I could trust you, old pal, so I’ve told you the whole story.Here I am-do with me as you will. Life holds nothing more for me, now that-Marjorie-isgone!”

Bruce’s voice trembled with emotion and broke as he mentioned the name of the girl he loved.

I leaned across the table, and gazed searchingly into the eyes of the abjectfigure that slouched dejectedly in the big chair. Then I rose, put on my hat and coat, crossedto Bruce, who had buried his head in his hands, and was shaking with silent sobs.

“Bruce!”

Malcolm Bruce raised his eyes.

“Bruce, listen to me. Are you sure Marjorie Purdy is dead?”

“Am I sure that-” His eyes widened at the suggestion, and hesat erect with a sudden start.

“Exactly”, I went on. “Are you positive that the ashes in thatjar were the ashes of Marjorie Purdy?”

“Why-I-see here, Prague! What are you driving at?”

“Then you’re not sure. You saw the girl’s hat and coatin that chair, and in your state of mind you jumped at conclusions. ‘The ashes must be thoseof the missing girl. . . . The Professor must have made away with her. . . .’and all that. Come now, did Van Allister tell you anything-”

“I don’t know what he said. I tell you I went berserk -mad!”

“Then you come along with me. If she’s not dead, she must be somewherein that house, and if she is there, we’re going to find her!”

On the street we hailed a taxi, and in a few moments the butler admitted usto Van Allister’s home. Bruce let us into the laboratory with his key. The door of theworkshop was still ajar.

My eyes swept the room in a comprehensive survey. At the left over near thewindow, was a closed door. I strode across the room and tried the knob, but it refused to yield.

“Where does that lead?”

“Just an anteroom, where the Professor keeps his apparatus.”

“All the same, that door’s coming open”, I returned, grimly.Stepping back a pace or two, I planted a well-directed kick upon the door. Another, and stillanother, and the frame-work around the lock gave way.

Bruce, with an inarticulate cry, sped across the room to a huge mahoganychest. He selected one of the keys on his ring, inserted it in the lock, and flung back thecover with trembling hands.

“Here she is, Prague-quick! Get her out where there’s air!”

Together we bore the limp figure of the girl into the laboratory. Bruce hastilymixed a concoction which he forced between her lips. A second dose, and her eyes slowly opened.

Her bewildered glance traveled around the room, at last resting on Bruce, andher eyes lighted with sudden, happy recognition. Later, after the first few moments of reunion,the girl told us her story:

“After Malcolm went out, this afternoon, the Professor sent word to meto come into the workshop. As he often summoned me to do some errand or other, I thought nothingof it, and to save time, took my hat and coat along. He closed the door of the little room,and, without warning, attacked me from behind. He overpowered me, tied me hand and foot. Itwas needless to gag me. As you know, the laboratory is absolutely sound-proof.”

“Then he produced a huge Newfoundland dog he had secured from somewhereor other, reduced it to ashes before my very eyes, and put the ashes in a glass jar that wason a tabourette in the workshop.”

“He went into the anteroom and, from the chest where you found me, tookout the glass casket. At least, it seemed a casket to my terror-stricken eyes! He mixed enoughof his horrible liquid to fill it almost to the brim.”

“Then he told me that but one thing remained. That was-to performthe experiment upon a human being!” She shuddered at the recollection. “He dilatedat length upon what a privilege it would be for anyone to sacrifice his life in such a manner,for such a cause. Then he calmly informed me that he had selected you as the subject of hisexperiment, and that I was to play the role of witness! I fainted.”

“The Professor must have feared some sort of intrusion, for the next Iremember is waking inside the chest where you discovered me. It was stifling! Every breath Itook came harder and harder. I thought of you, Malcolm–thought of the wonderful, happyhours we had spent together the last few days. I wondered what I would do when you were gone!I even prayed that he would kill me, too! My throat grew parched and dry–everything wentblack before my eyes.”

“Next I opened them to find myself here-with you, Malcolm”,her voice sank to a hoarse, nervous whisper. “Where-where is the Professor?”

Bruce silently led her into the workshop. She shivered as the coffin of glasscame within her range of vision. Still silently, he crossed directly to the casket, and, takingup a handful of the soft, white ashes, let them sift slowly through his fingers!

C.L. Moore

George Campbell opened sleep-fogged eyes upon darkness and lay gazing out of thetent flap upon the pale August night for some minutes before he roused enough even to wonder whathad wakened him. There was in the keen, clear air of these Canadian woods a soporific as potent asany drug. Campbell lay quiet for a moment, sinking slowly back into the delicious borderlands ofsleep, conscious of an exquisite weariness, an unaccustomed sense of muscles well used, and relaxednow into perfect ease. These were vacation’s most delightful moments, after all—rest,after toil, in the clear, sweet forest night.

Luxuriously, as his mind sank backward into oblivion, he assured himself once morethat three long months of freedom lay before him—freedom from cities and monotony, freedomfrom pedagogy and the University and students with no rudiments of interest in the geology heearned his daily bread by dinning into their obdurate ears. Freedom from—

Abruptly the delightful somnolence crashed about him. Somewhere outside the soundof tin shrieking across tin slashed into his peace. George Campbell sat up jerkily and reached forhis flashlight. Then he laughed and put it down again, straining his eyes through the midnightgloom outside where among the tumbling cans of his supplies a dark anonymous little night beast wasprowling. He stretched out a long arm and groped about among the rocks at the tent door for amissile. His fingers closed on a large stone, and he drew back his hand to throw.

But he never threw it. It was such a queer thing he had come upon in the dark.Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners. The strangeness of itsrock surfaces to his fingers was so remarkable that he reached again for his flashlight and turnedits rays upon the thing he held.

All sleepiness left him as he saw what it was he had picked up in his idlegroping. It was clear as rock crystal, this queer, smooth cube. Quartz, unquestionably, but not inits usual hexagonal crystallized form. Somehow—he could not guess the method—it had beenwrought into a perfect cube, about four inches in measurement over each worn face. For it wasincredibly worn. The hard, hard crystal was rounded now until its corners were almost gone and thething was beginning to assume the outlines of a sphere. Ages and ages of wearing, years almostbeyond counting, must have passed over this strange clear thing.

But the most curious thing of all was that shape he could make out dimly in theheart of the crystal. For imbedded in its center lay a little disc of a pale and nameless substancewith characters incised deep upon its quartz-enclosed surface. Wedge-shaped characters, faintlyreminiscent of cuneiform writing.

George Campbell wrinkled his brows and bent closer above the little enigma in hishands, puzzling helplessly. How could such a thing as this have imbedded in pure rock crystal?Remotely a memory floated through his mind of ancient legends that called quartz crystals ice whichhad frozen too hard to melt again. Ice—and wedge-shaped cuneiforms—yes, didn’t thatsort of writing originate among the Sumerians who came down from the north in history’sremotest beginnings to settle in the primitive Mesopotamian valley? Then hard sense regainedcontrol and he laughed. Quartz, of course, was formed in the earliest of earth’s geologicalperiods, when there was nothing anywhere but heat and heaving rock. Ice had not come for tens ofmillions of years after this thing must have been formed.

And yet—that writing. Man-made, surely, although its characters wereunfamiliar save in their faint hinting at cuneiform shapes. Or could there, in a Paleozoic world,have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon thequartz-enveloped disc he held? Or—might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of spaceinto the unformed rock of a still molten world? Could it—

Then he caught himself up sharply and felt his ears going hot at the luridness ofhis own imagination. The silence and the solitude and the queer thing in his hands were conspiringto play tricks with his common sense. He shrugged and laid the crystal down at the edge of hispallet, switching off the light. Perhaps morning and a clear head would bring him an answer to thequestions that seemed so insoluble now.

But sleep did not come easily. For one thing, it seemed to him as he flashed offthe light, that the little cube had shone for a moment as if with sustained light before it fadedinto the surrounding dark. Or perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had been only his dazzled eyes thatseemed to see the light forsake it reluctantly, glowing in the enigmatic deeps of the thing withqueer persistence.

He lay there unquietly for a long while, turning the unanswered questions over andover in his mind. There was something about this crystal cube out of the unmeasured past, perhapsfrom the dawn of all history, that constituted a challenge that would not let him sleep.

A. Merritt

He lay there, it seemed to him, for hours. It had been the lingering light, theluminescence that seemed so reluctant to die, which held his mind. It was as though something inthe heart of the cube had awakened, stirred drowsily, become suddenly alert . . .and intent upon him.

Sheer fantasy, this. He stirred impatiently and flashed his light upon his watch.Close to one o’clock; three hours more before the dawn. The beam fell and was focused upon thewarm crystal cube. He held it there closely, for minutes. He snapped it out, then watched.

There was no doubt about it now. As his eyes accustomed themselves to thedarkness, he saw that the strange crystal was glimmering with tiny fugitive lights deep within itlike threads of sapphire lightnings. They were at its center and they seemed to him to come fromthe pale disk with its disturbing markings. And the disc itself was becominglarger . . . the markings shifting shapes . . . the cube wasgrowing . . . was it illusion brought about by the tinylightnings. . . .

He heard a sound. It was the very ghost of a sound, like the ghosts of harpstrings being plucked with ghostly fingers. He bent closer. It came from thecube. . . .

There was squeaking in the underbrush, a flurry of bodies and an agonized wailinglike a child in death throes and swiftly stilled. Some small tragedy of the wilderness, killer andprey. He stepped over to where it had been enacted, but could see nothing. He again snapped off theflash and looked toward his tent. Upon the ground was a pale blue glimmering. It was the cube. Hestooped to pick it up; then obeying some obscure warning, drew back his hand.

And again, he saw, its glow was dying. The tiny sapphire lightnings flashingfitfully, withdrawing to the disc from which they had come. There was no sound from it.

He sat, watching the luminescence glow and fade, glow and fade, but steadilybecoming dimmer. It came to him that two elements were necessary to produce the phenomenon. Theelectric ray itself, and his own fixed attention. His mind must travel along the ray, fix itselfupon the cube’s heart, if its beat were to wax, until . . . what?

He felt a chill of spirit, as though from contact with some alien thing. It wasalien, he knew it; not of this earth. Not of earth’s life. He conquered his shrinking, pickedup the cube and took it into the tent. It was neither warm nor cold; except for its weight he wouldnot have known he held it. He put it upon the table, keeping the torch turned from it; then steppedto the flap of the tent and closed it.

He went back to the table, drew up the camp chair, and turned the flash directlyupon the cube, focusing it so far as he could upon its heart. He sent all his will, all hisconcentration, along it; focusing will and sight upon the disc as he had the light.

As though at command, the sapphire lightnings burned forth. They burst from thedisc into the body of the crystal cube, then beat back, bathing the disc and the markings. Againthese began to change, shifting, moving, advancing, and retreating in the blue gleaming. They wereno longer cuneiform. They were things . . . objects.

He heard the murmuring music, the plucked harp strings. Louder grew the sound andlouder, and now all the body of the cube vibrated to their rhythm. The crystal walls were melting,growing misty as though formed of the mist of diamonds. And the disc itself wasgrowing . . . the shapes shifting, dividing and multiplying as though some door hadbeen opened and into it companies of phantasms were pouring. While brighter, more bright grew thepulsing light.

He felt swift panic, tried to withdraw sight and will, dropped the flash. The cubehad no need now of the ray . . . and he could not withdraw . . .could not withdraw? Why, he himself was being sucked into that disc which was now a globe withinwhich unnameable shapes danced to a music that bathed the globe with steady radiance.

There was no tent. There was only a vast curtain of sparkling mist behind whichshone the globe. . . . He felt himself drawn through that mist, sucked through it asif by a mighty wind, straight for the globe.

H. P. Lovecraft

As the mist-blurred light of the sapphire suns grew more and more intense, theoutlines of the globe ahead wavered and dissolved to a churning chaos. Its pallor and its motionand its music all blended themselves with the engulfing mist—bleaching it to a palesteel-colour and setting it undulantly in motion. And the sapphire suns, too, melted imperceptiblyinto the greying infinity of shapeless pulsation.

Meanwhile the sense of forward, outward motion grew intolerably, incredibly,cosmically swift. Every standard of speed known to earth seemed dwarfed, and Campbell knew that anysuch flight in physical reality would mean instant death to a human being. Even as it was—inthis strange, hellish hypnosis or nightmare—the quasi-visual impression of meteor-likehurtling almost paralyzed his mind. Though there were no real points of reference in the grey,pulsing void, he felt that he was approaching and passing the speed of light itself. Finally hisconsciousness did go under—and merciful blackness swallowed everything.

It was very suddenly, and amidst the most impenetrable darkness, that thoughts andideas again came to George Campbell. Of how many moments—or years—or eternities—hadelapsed since his flight through the grey void, he could form no estimate. He knew only that heseemed to be at rest and without pain. Indeed, the absence of all physical sensation was thesalient quality of his condition. It made even the blackness seem less solidlyblack—suggesting as it did that he was rather a disembodied intelligence in a state beyondphysical senses, than a corporeal being with senses deprived of their accustomed objects ofperception. He could think sharply and quickly—almost preternaturally so—yet could formno idea whatsoever of his situation.

Half by instinct, he realised that he was not in his own tent. True, he might haveawaked there from a nightmare to a world equally black; yet he knew this was not so. There was nocamp cot beneath him—he had no hands to feel the blankets and canvas surface and flashlightthat ought to be around him—there was no sensation of cold in the air—no flap throughwhich he could glimpse the pale night outside . . . something was wrong, dreadfullywrong.

He cast his mind backward and thought of the fluorescent cube which had hypnotisedhim—of that, and all which had followed. He had known that his mind was going, yet had beenunable to draw back. At the last moment there had been a shocking, panic fear—a subconsciousfear beyond even that caused by the sensation of daemonic flight. It had come from some vague flashor remote recollection—just what, he could not at once tell. Some cell-group in the back ofhis head had seemed to find a cloudily familiar quality in the cube—and that familiarity wasfraught with dim terror. Now he tried to remember what the familiarity and the terror were.

Little by little it came to him. Once—long ago, in connection with hisgeological life-work—he had read of something like that cube. It had to do with thosedebatable and disquieting clay fragments called the Eltdown Shards, dug up from pre-carboniferousstrata in southern England thirty years before. Their shape and markings were so queer that a fewscholars hinted at artificiality, and made wild conjectures about them and their origin. They came,clearly, from a time when no human beings could exist on the globe—but their contours andfigurings were damnably puzzling. That was how they got their name.

It was not, however, in the writings of any sober scientist that Campbell had seenthat reference to a crystal, disc-holding globe. The source was far less reputable, and infinitelymore vivid. About 1912 a deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings—the ReverendArthur Brooke Winters-Hall—had professed to identify the markings on the Eltdown Shards withsome of the so-called “pre-human hieroglyphs” persistently cherished and esotericallyhanded down in certain mystical circles, and had published at his own expense what purported to bea “translation” of the primal and baffling “inscriptions” —a“translation” still quoted frequently and seriously by occult writers. In this“translation” —a surprisingly long brochure in view of the limited number of“shards” existing—had occurred the narrative, supposedly of pre-human authorship,containing the now frightening reference.

As the story went, there dwelt on a world—and eventually on countless otherworlds—of outer space a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose controlof nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination. They had mastered the artof interstellar travel early in their career, and had peopled every habitable planet in their owngalaxy—killing off the races they found.

Beyond the limits of their own galaxy—which was not ours—they could notnavigate in person; but in their quest for knowledge of all space and time they discovered a meansof spanning certain transgalactic gulfs with their minds. They devised peculiarobjects—strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen andenclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance—which could beforcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe, and which would respond to the attraction ofcool solid matter only.

These, of which a few would necessarily land on various inhabited worlds inoutside universes, formed the ether-bridges needed for mental communication. Atmospheric frictionburned away the protecting envelope, leaving the cube exposed and subject to discovery by theintelligent minds of the world where it fell. By its very nature, the cube would attract and rivetattention. This, when coupled with the action of light, was sufficient to set its specialproperties working.

The mind that noticed the cube would be drawn into it by the power of the disc,and would be sent on a thread of obscure energy to the place whence the disc had come—theremote world of the worm-like space-explorers across stupendous galactic abysses. Received in oneof the machines to which each cube was attuned, the captured mind would remain suspended withoutbody or senses until examined by one of the dominant race. Then it would, by an obscure process ofinterchange, be pumped of all its contents. The investigator’s mind would now occupy thestrange machine while the captive mind occupied the interrogator’s worm-like body. Then, inanother interchange, the interrogator’s mind would leap across boundless space to thecaptive’s vacant and unconscious body on the trans-galactic world—animating the alientenement as best it might, and exploring the alien world in the guise of one of its denizens.

When done with exploration, the adventurer would use the cube and its disc inaccomplishing his return—and sometimes the captured mind would be restored safely to its ownremote world. Not always, however, was the dominant race so kind. Sometimes, when a potentiallyimportant race capable of space travel was found, the worm-like folk would employ the cube tocapture and annihilate minds by the thousands, and would extirpate the race for diplomaticreasons—using the exploring minds as agents of destruction.

In other cases sections of the worm-folk would permanently occupy a trans-galacticplanet—destroying the captured minds and wiping out the remaining inhabitants preparatory tosettling down in unfamiliar bodies. Never, however, could the parent civilization be quiteduplicated in such a case; since the new planet would not contain all the materials necessary forthe worm-race’s arts. The cubes, for example, could be made only on the home planet.

Only a few of the numberless cubes sent forth ever found a landing and response onan inhabited world—since there was no such thing as aiming them at goals beyond sight orknowledge. Only three, ran the story, had ever landed on peopled worlds in our own particularuniverse. One of these had struck a planet near the galactic rim two thousand billion years ago,while another had lodged three billion years ago on a world near the centre of the galaxy. Thethird—and the only one ever known to have invaded the solar system—had reached our ownearth 150,000,000 years ago.

It was with this latter that Dr. Winters-Hall’s “translation”chiefly dealt. When the cube struck the earth, he wrote, the ruling terrestrial species was a huge,cone-shaped race surpassing all others before or since in mentality and achievements. This race wasso advanced that it had actually sent minds abroad in both space and time to explore the cosmos,hence recognised something of what had happened when the cube fell from the sky and certainindividuals had suffered mental change after gazing at it.

Realising that the changed individuals represented invading minds, the race’sleaders had them destroyed—even at the cost of leaving the displaced minds exiled in alienspace. They had had experience with even stranger transitions. When, through a mental explorationof space and time, they formed a rough idea of what the cube was, they carefully hid the thing fromlight and sight, and guarded it as a menace. They did not wish to destroy a thing so rich in laterexperimental possibilities. Now and then some rash, unscrupulous adventurer would furtively gainaccess to it and sample its perilous powers despite the consequences—but all such cases werediscovered, and safely and drastically dealt with.

Of this evil meddling the only bad result was that the worm-like outside racelearned from the new exiles what had happened to their explorers on earth, and conceived a violenthatred of the planet and all its life-forms. They would have depopulated it if they could, andindeed sent additional cubes into space in the wild hope of striking it by accident in unguardedplaces—but that accident never came to pass.

The cone-shaped terrestrial beings kept the one existing cube in a special shrineas a relique and basis for experiments, till after aeons it was lost amidst the chaos of war andthe destruction of the great polar city where it was guarded. When, fifty million years ago, thebeings sent their minds ahead into the infinite future to avoid a nameless peril of inner earth,the whereabouts of the sinister cube from space were unknown.

This much, according to the learned occultist, the Eltdown Shards had said. Whatnow made the account so obscurely frightful to Campbell was the minute accuracy with which thealien cube had been described. Every detail tallied—dimensions, consistency, hieroglyphedcentral disc, hypnotic effects. As he thought the matter over and over amidst the darkness of hisstrange situation, he began to wonder whether his whole experience with the crystalcube—indeed, its very existence—were not a nightmare brought on by some freakishsubconscious memory of this old bit of extravagant, charlatanic reading. If so, though, thenightmare must still be in force; since his present apparently bodiless state had nothing ofnormality in it.

Of the time consumed by this puzzled memory and reflection, Campbell could form noestimate. Everything about his state was so unreal that ordinary dimensions and measurements becamemeaningless. It seemed an eternity, but perhaps it was not really long before the suddeninterruption came. What happened was as strange and inexplicable as the blackness it succeeded.There was a sensation—of the mind rather than of the body—and all at once Campbell felt histhoughts swept or sucked beyond his control in tumultuous and chaotic fashion.

Memories arose irresponsibly and irrelevantly. All that he knew—all hispersonal background, traditions, experiences, scholarship, dreams, ideas, and inspirations—welledup abruptly and simultaneously, with a dizzying speed and abundance which soon made him unable tokeep track of any separate concept. The parade of all his mental contents became an avalanche, acascade, a vortex. It was as horrible and vertiginous as his hypnotic flight through space when thecrystal cube pulled him. Finally it sapped his consciousness and brought on fresh oblivion.

Another measureless blank—and then a slow trickle of sensation. This time itwas physical, not mental. Sapphire light, and a low rumble of distant sound. There were tactileimpressions—he could realise that he was lying at full length on something, though there was abaffling strangeness about the feel of his posture. He could not reconcile the pressure of thesupporting surface with his own outlines—or with the outlines of the human form at all. Hetried to move his arms, but found no definite response to the attempt. Instead, there were little,ineffectual nervous twitches all over the area which seemed to mark his body.

He tried to open his eyes more widely, but found himself unable to control theirmechanism. The sapphire light came in a diffused, nebulous manner, and could nowhere be voluntarilyfocussed into definiteness. Gradually, though, visual images began to trickle in curiously andindecisively. The limits and qualities of vision were not those which he was used to, but he couldroughly correlate the sensation with what he had known as sight. As this sensation gained somedegree of stability, Campbell realised that he must still be in the throes of nightmare.

He seemed to be in a room of considerable extent—of medium height, but with alarge proportionate area. On every side—and he could apparently see all four sides atonce—were high, narrowish slits which seemed to serve as combined doors and windows. Therewere singular low tables or pedestals, but no furniture of normal nature and proportions. Throughthe slits streamed floods of sapphire light, and beyond them could be mistily seen the sides androofs of fantastic buildings like clustered cubes. On the walls—in the vertical panels betweenthe slits—were strange markings of an oddly disquieting character. It was some time beforeCampbell understood why they disturbed him so—then he saw that they were, in repeatedinstances, precisely like some of the hieroglyphs on the crystal cube’s disc.

The actual nightmare element, though, was something more than this. It began withthe living thing which presently entered through one of the slits, advancing deliberately towardhim and bearing a metal box of bizarre proportions and glassy, mirror-like surfaces. For this thingwas nothing human—nothing of earth—nothing even of man’s myths and dreams. It was agigantic, pale-grey worm or centipede, as large around as a man and twice as long, with adisc-like, apparently eyeless, cilia-fringed head bearing a purple central orifice. It glided onits rear pairs of legs, with its fore part raised vertically—the legs, or at least two pairsof them, serving as arms. Along its spinal ridge was a curious purple comb, and a fan-shaped tailof some grey membrane ended its grotesque bulk. There was a ring of flexible red spikes around itsneck, and from the twistings of these came clicking, twanging sounds in measured, deliberaterhythms.

Here, indeed, was outré nightmare at its height—capricious fantasy at itsapex. But even this vision of delirium was not what caused George Campbell to lapse a third timeinto unconsciousness. It took one more thing—one final, unbearable touch—to do that. Asthe nameless worm advanced with its glistening box, the reclining man caught in the mirror-likesurface a glimpse of what should have been his own body. Yet—horribly verifying his disorderedand unfamiliar sensations—it was not his own body at all that he saw reflected in theburnished metal. It was, instead, the loathsome, pale-grey bulk of one of the great centipedes.

Robert E. Howard

From that final lap of senselessness, he emerged with a full understanding of hissituation. His mind was imprisoned in the body of a frightful native of an alien planet, while,somewhere on the other side of the universe, his own body was housing the monster’spersonality.

He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why shouldhis metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Formwas unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards. Fear andrevulsion were drowned in the excitement of titanic adventure.

What was his former body but a cloak, eventually to be cast off at death anyway?He had no sentimental illusions about the life from which he had been exiled. What had it evergiven him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression? If this life before him offeredno more, at least it offered no less. Intuition told him it offered more—much more.

With the honesty possible only when life is stripped to its naked fundamentals, herealized that he remembered with pleasure only the physical delights of his former life. But he hadlong ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no newthrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exoticjoys.

A lawless exultation rose in him. He was a man without a world, free of allconventions or inhibitions of Earth, or of this strange planet, free of every artificial restraintin the universe. He was a god! With grim amusem*nt he thought of his body moving in earth’sbusiness and society, with all the while an alien monster staring out of the windows that wereGeorge Campbell’s eyes on people who would flee if they knew.

Let him walk the earth slaying and destroying as he would. Earth and its races nolonger had any meaning to George Campbell. There he had been one of a billion nonentities, fixed inplace by a mountainous accumulation of conventions, laws and manners, doomed to live and die in hissordid niche. But in one blind bound he had soared above the commonplace. This was not death, butre-birth—the birth of a full-grown mentality, with a new-found freedom that made little ofphysical captivity on Yekub.

He started. Yekub! It was the name of this planet, but how had he known? Then heknew, as he knew the name of him whose body he occupied—Tothe. Memory, deep grooved inTothe’s brain, was stirring in him—shadows of the knowledge Tothe had. Carved deep in thephysical tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and hishuman consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only to safety andfreedom, but to the power his soul, stripped to its primitive impulses, craved. Not as a slavewould he dwell on Yekub, but as a king! Just as of old barbarians had sat on the throne of lordlyempires.

For the first time he turned his attention to his surroundings. He still lay onthe couch-like thing in the midst of that fantastic room, and the centipede man stood before him,holding the polished metal object, and clashing its neck-spikes. Thus it spoke to him, Campbellknew, and what it said he dimly understood, through the implanted thought processes of Tothe, justas he knew the creature was Yukth, supreme lord of science.

But Campbell gave no heed, for he had made his desperate plan, a plan so alien tothe ways of Yekub that it was beyond Yukth’s comprehension and caught him wholly unprepared.Yukth, like Campbell, saw the sharp-pointed metal shard on a nearby table, but to Yukth it was onlya scientific implement. He did not even know it could be used as a weapon. Campbell’s earthlymind supplied the knowledge and the action that followed, driving Tothe’s body into movementsno man of Yekub had ever made before.

Campbell snatched the pointed shard and struck, ripping savagely upward. Yukthreared and toppled, his entrails spilling on the floor. In an instant Campbell was streaking for adoor. His speed was amazing, exhilarating, first fulfillment of the promise of novel physicalsensations.

As he ran, guided wholly by the instinctive knowledge implanted in Tothe’sphysical reflexes, it was as if he were borne by a separate consciousness in his legs. Tothe’sbody was bearing him along a route it had traversed ten thousand times when animated byTothe’s mind.

Down a winding corridor he raced, up a twisted stair, through a carved door, andthe same instincts that had brought him there told him he had found what he sought. He was in acircular room with a domed roof from which shone a livid blue light. A strange structure rose inthe middle of the rainbow-hued floor, tier on tier, each of a separate, vivid color. The ultimatetier was a purple cone, from the apex of which a blue smoky mist drifted upward to a sphere thatpoised in mid-air—a sphere that shone like translucent ivory.

This, the deep-grooved memories of Tothe told Campbell, was the god of Yekub,though why the people of Yekub feared and worshipped it had been forgotten a million years. Aworm-priest stood between him and the altar which no hand of flesh had ever touched. That it couldbe touched was a blasphemy that had never occurred to a man of Yekub. The worm-priest stood infrozen horror until Campbell’s shard ripped the life out of him.

On his centipede-legs Campbell clambered the tiered altar, heedless of its suddenquiverings, heedless of the change that was taking place in the floating sphere, heedless of thesmoke that now billowed out in blue clouds. He was drunk with the feel of power. He feared thesuperstitions of Yekub no more than he feared those of earth. With that globe in his hands he wouldbe king of Yekub. The worm men would dare deny him nothing, when he held their god as hostage. Hereached a hand for the ball—no longer ivory-hued, but red as blood. . . .

Frank Belknap Long

Out of the tent into the pale August night walked the body of George Campbell. Itmoved with a slow, wavering gait between the bodies of enormous trees, over a forest path strewedwith sweet scented pine needles. The air was crisp and cold. The sky was an inverted bowl offrosted silver flecked with stardust, and far to the north the Aurora Borealis splashed streamersof fire.

The head of the walking man lolled hideously from side to side. From the cornersof his lax mouth drooled thick threads of amber froth, which fluttered in the night breeze. Hewalked upright at first, as a man would walk, but gradually as the tent receded, his posturealtered. His torso began almost imperceptibly to slant, and his limbs to shorten.

In a far-off world of outer space the centipede creature that was George Campbellclasped to its bosom a god whose lineaments were red as blood, and ran with insect-like quiveringsacross a rainbow-hued hall and out through massive portals into the bright glow of alien suns.

Weaving between the trees of earth in an attitude that suggested the awkwardloping of a werebeast, the body of George Campbell was fulfilling a mindless destiny. Long,claw-tipped fingers dragged leaves from a carpet of odorous pine needles as it moved toward a wideexpanse of gleaming water.

In the far-off, extra-galactic world of the worm people, George Campbell movedbetween cyclopean blocks of black masonry down long, fern-planted avenues holding aloft the roundred god.

There was a harsh animal cry in the underbrush near the gleaming lake on earthwhere the mind of a worm creature dwelt in a body swayed by instinct. Human teeth sank into softanimal fur, tore at black animal flesh. A little silver fox sank its fangs in frantic retaliationinto a furry human wrist, and thrashed about in terror as its blood spurted. Slowly the body ofGeorge Campbell arose, its mouth splashed with fresh blood. With upper limbs swaying oddly it movedtowards the waters of the lake.

As the variform creature that was George Campbell crawled between the black blocksof stone thousands of worm-shapes prostrated themselves in the scintillating dust before it. Agodlike power seemed to emanate from its weaving body as it moved with a slow, undulant motiontoward a throne of spiritual empire transcending all the sovereignties of earth.

A trapper stumbling wearily through the dense woods of earth near the tent wherethe worm-creature dwelt in the body of George Campbell came to the gleaming waters of the lake anddiscerned something dark floating there. He had been lost in the woods all night, and wearinessenveloped him like a leaden cloak in the pale morning light.

But the shape was a challenge that he could not ignore. Moving to the edge of thewater he knelt in the soft mud and reached out toward the floating bulk. Slowly he pulled it to theshore.

Far off in outer space the worm-creature holding the glowing red god ascended athrone that gleamed like the constellation Cassiopeia under an alien vault of hyper-suns. The greatdeity that he held aloft energized his worm tenement, burning away in the white fire of asupermundane spirituality all animal dross.

On earth the trapper gazed with unutterable horror into the blackened and hairyface of the drowned man. It was a bestial face, repulsively anthropoid in contour, and from itstwisted, distorted mouth black ichor poured.

“He who sought your body in the abysses of Time will occupy an unresponsivetenement”, said the red god. “No spawn of Yekub can control the body of a human.”

“On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with unutterablecruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a bestial man-body when it yearns to raven.Only man-minds instinctively conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keepthe human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy itself on earth, seeking the blood of itsanimal kin, seeking the cool water where it can wallow at its ease. Seeking eventually destruction,for the death-instinct is more powerful in it than the instincts of life and it will destroy itselfin seeking to return to the slime from which it sprang.”

Thus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the space-timecontinuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human desire purged away, sat on a throne andruled an empire of worms more wisely kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruledan empire of men.

H.P. Lovecraft’s works can be categorized into several thematic and stylistic groups. While “The Cthulhu Mythos” and “The Dream Cycle” are themostfamous, there are other categories that encompass his diverse range of stories:

These categories help organize Lovecraft’s extensive body of work and highlight the recurring themes and settings that define his uniquecontribution to the genre of weird fiction.

The timeline of Lovecraft’s universe is a vast and complex chronology that spans eons, detailing the rise and fall of cosmic entities and ancientcivilizations. The universe is populated by a pantheon of ancient, powerful, and malevolent entities known as the Great Old Ones. These beingsare so ancient and powerful that they are incomprehensible to humanity. In general, the cosmic entities in Lovecraft’s universe are indifferentto the fate of humanity. Their actions might seem malevolent, but they are simply following their own alien motives.

To help readers navigate the Lovecraft universe, we have compiled a list of the most important events in the timeline of the Lovecraft Universe.

Pre-human Era

Ancient Civilizations

Human Era

Historical and Modern Era

Future and Beyond

This timeline encapsulates the cyclical nature of the Mythos, where ancient cosmic entities periodically interact with human history, often leadingto catastrophic and horrifying outcomes. Lovecraft’s work emphasizes the insignificance of humanity in the face of these vast, timeless forces.

The Lovecraft Mythos features a pantheon of ancient and powerful entities, often categorized as Elder Gods, Great Old Ones, and other eldritchbeings. This section contains an overview of these beings, starting from the oldest and most significant entities, and moving down the hierarchy.This hierarchy illustrates the complex and terrifying cosmology of Lovecraft’s Mythos, where humanity is but a tiny, insignificant part of a vastand indifferent universe filled with ancient beings of unimaginable power. These entities, from the omnipotent Elder Gods to the monstrous Great OldOnes and the advanced Elder Things.

Elder Gods

The Elder Gods are typically depicted as neutral - sometimes almost benevolent - deities that oppose the Great Old Ones and other malevolententities. They are less frequently mentioned in Lovecraft’s original works and are more prominent in the writings of later authors like AugustDerleth.

Great Old Ones

The Great Old Ones are ancient, powerful entities that once ruled the Earth and are now imprisoned or dormant, awaiting a time when they can return.

Elder Things

The Elder Things, also known as the Old Ones, are an ancient extraterrestrial species that came to Earth long before humans existed. They are notgods but highly advanced beings.

Other Notable Entities

Notable Races and Servitors

Notable Cults and Groups