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Oll Stof, President of the Chamber and representative of the Milliner’s Soviet,
raised his eyeless snout with dignity] and prepared to address the assembled multitude. |
Another cause of
the landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths upon which
successful sea-life depended. |
His own idea of
the situation was very broad, and by no means limited to whales, since he had to do with a monster
so much stranger. |
The mechanical mode of writing cannot be deduced beyond the fact that it must have resembled
that of the modern slate and slate-pencil. |
.”
There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought to rescue
the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. |
He watched and listened with his mind more than with his eyes
and ears, and strove every moment to drown something in his ceaseless poring over gay, insipid
novels. |
One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled
streets of Ulthar. |
The shaft of
light entered the door at an upward angle, and I peered in to see if I could glimpse anything,
but all in vain. |
They would have given
much for a glimpse of the papers Charles had found, for very clearly the key to the youth’s
madness lay in what he had learned of the ancient wizard and his doings. |
They talked of their illustrious
Tyrant, and of the splendour of his capital; and exulted in the glory of the statue which Musides
had wrought for him. |
This he
would sometimes draw from his tattered pocket, carefully unwrap from its covering of tissue
paper, and gaze upon for hours with an expression of ineffable sadness and tenderness. |
We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney
and were standing in a kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our consciousness—the
first sounds we had heard since descending out of the open where the mountain wind whined faintly
from its unearthly heights. |
The disturbed debris formed an impression
we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger. |
Failing to find a lantern, he
chose the smallest of the lamps to carry; also filling his pockets with candles and matches, and
taking with him a gallon can of oil, which he proposed to keep for reserve use in whatever hidden
laboratory he might uncover beyond the terrible open space with its unclean altar and nameless
... |
The ancient books taken
from Whateley’s quarters, while absorbingly interesting and in several cases promising
to open up new and terrible lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of
no assistance whatever in this matter. |
I recall that I did not regard it as
a common flashlight—indeed, I had a common flashlight in another pocket. |
Instantly the outside knocking became a violent battering, while keys sounded
ominously in the hall doors of the rooms on both sides of me. |
Of course,
this whispering was largely baseless on the face of it; but it was curious to reflect how persistently
visitors were forbidden to enter the pyramids at night, or to visit the lowest burrows and crypt
of the Great Pyramid. |
Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to those
mountains; but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyond. |
There would be a Guide—and a very terrible one; a Guide who had been
an entity of earth millions of years before, when man was undreamed of, and when forgotten shapes
moved on a steaming planet building strange cities among whose last, crumbling ruins the earliest
mammals were to play. |
An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman’s
Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. |
Though I knew that death was near, my curiosity was consuming; and I threw the searchlight’s
beam about in eager quest. |
No motion from me then, or word now, could reveal my plight, or tell
of the fear-racked brain imprisoned in flesh which dared not break the silence, for all the
torture it brought. |
Tucked obscurely
away in a corner of the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the Associated
Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whiskey of Dunwich had raised up. |
“Long have I missed thee, Aira, for I was but young when we went into
exile; but my father was thy King and I shall come again to thee, for it is so decreed of Fate. |
From Lydia to Neapolis the beauty of their work
was praised, and none dared say that the one excelled the other in skill. |
The
notion that any low secret society was preying upon him, as hinted by his relatives, was obviously
absurd; and shewed how sadly limited was their understanding of him and his work. |
Like land of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world
of untrodden wonder. |
It was hard to get this information from the traders and sailors in Dylath-Leen’s
sea-taverns, because they mostly preferred to whisper of the black galleys. |
Perhaps this tendency toward wildness had been
stimulated somewhat by the repression to which he had been subjected at home; for Mrs. Trever
had particular reason for training her only child with rigid severity. |
I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love
of the grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors
in literature and in life. |
Malone
did not know him by sight till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly
as a really profound authority on mediaeval superstition, and had once idly meant to look up
an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted
from memory. |
Many were the waterfalls in
their courses, and many were the lilied lakelets into which they expanded. |
It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its
chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant whippoorwills outside. |
“If he thinks his pseudo-medical rhetoric can take a real doctor in, he is even simpler
than I thought!”
Clarendon nervously found the right page and began reading as he stood there
clutching his syringe. |
He is the kin of the jungle’s
lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. |
It is hard to explain
just how a single sight of a tangible object with measureable dimensions could so shake and change
a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism
and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker’s perspective and whispers
terrible hint... |
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. |
It brought you here, you know, and it sealed up
the hole somehow.” And Willett again let silence answer for him. |
These few—old Scipio
and his wife Sarah, the cook Delilah, and Mary, Scipio’s daughter—were as civil as
possible; but plainly revealed that their new mistress commanded their duty rather than their
affection. |
When he took down the shutter the wind and rain howled
deafeningly in, so that I could not hear what he said; but I waited while he leaned out and
tried to fathom Nature’s pandemonium. |
I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed
paw which had reached out of the earth to crush and engulf me. |
The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient
brought rumours of a suspected fight and death. |
I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream life, and from
this you may judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patient
as soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case. |
Johnson, indeed, had a most singular Habit of speaking
for Davy when others were against him, and of arguing against him, when others were for
him. |
But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man admits
a thing untold by his grandfather. |
The ammonia ceased to drip, and as I cleaned up what had spilled and opened the
window for air, I heard the landlady’s heavy footsteps above me. |
I hardly knew what to think of the frightful puzzle, yet
rebelled at any notion to conflict with sane materialism. |
While nothing
appeared to grow different in kind, there was certainly a very terrible difference in degree; and
Dr. Willett somehow attaches great significance to the change. |
Asenath was supposed to be with him, though watchful gossips declared there was someone upstairs
in the house behind the doubly curtained windows. |
What’s your hurry if you don’t
believe in It?”
Some new idea seemed to have struck Rogers, and Jones eyed him closely. |
Later
I shall go to Toronto and plant a few evidences for my fictitious past. |
As I re-read the cramped handwriting I felt as never before that my credulous
opponents might have more on their side than I had conceded. |
When the matter had blown over, and Marceline had forgotten
about her new infatuation, it would be time enough to have Denis on hand again. |
Made bold by this
heaven-sent circumstance, I began to resume perfect openness in going to the vault; confident
that no one could witness my entrance. |
“There is Providence, quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue
harbour, with terraces of green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and
Newport climbing wraith-like from its dreaming breakwater. |
This blast had been followed by a
repetition of the great shaft of light from the stone building, and in another moment, after a
quick sounding of the second signal ordering a general invasion, there had come a subdued prattle
of musketry followed by a horrible roaring cry which the correspondent Luke Fenner had repres... |
He vows that I was broken down with nervous strain, and badly in
need of the long vacation on full pay which he so generously gave me. |
.”
His eyes grew deeply crafty, and he leaned forward, touching me on the knee
with the fingers of a paradoxically delicate hand. |
Jones, who had once had access to the dreaded Necronomicon, shivered
involuntarily as he recognised that symbol. |
All this must be stopped, or Mrs. Ward would be made ill and the keeping of servants
become an impossibility. |
The dark glassy surface displayed a pinkish glow, and a vague
white shape seemed to be taking form at its centre. |
You can put up a
stone in your lot at the North Burial Ground exactly ten feet west of your father’s and
facing the same way, and that will mark the true resting-place of your son. |
All his fathers who had it lived far beyond the century mark, perishing only in battle. |
It was based on certain
odd changes in his speech and habits; wild references to impending wonders, and unaccountable
hauntings of disreputable Brooklyn neighbourhoods. |
I had now obtained some very circumstantial accounts
of the final tragedy and flight of Walter de la Poer, which I conceived to be the probable contents
of the hereditary paper lost in the fire at Carfax. |
I wheeled around and saw her rushing like mad
out of the room—then I saw the picture.’
“Madness flared up in the boy’s eyes again as he got to this place,
and I thought for a minute he was going to spring at me with his machete. |
He had not been unmarked in Ulthar when he passed through, and the sleek
old cats had remembered how he petted them after they had attended to the hungry zoogs who looked
evilly at a small black kitten. |
Unmistakably, the weeds and bushes and briers were swaying as no wind could sway them; swaying
as if some large, swift serpent were wriggling purposefully along on the ground in pursuit of
me. |
I did not wait for him to speak, but at once began to explain my presence. |
In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church
at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps;
in which he said:
“It must be allow’d, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train
of Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny’d; the c... |
Dr. West had been avid for a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and
when the chance had come he carried me with him almost against my will. |
In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at secrecy; so that even
Dr. Lyman hesitates to date the youth’s madness from any period before the close of 1919. |
Our seat on the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my
prosaic friend would not mind the cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed brickwork close
behind us, or the utter blackness of the spot brought by the intervention of a tottering, deserted
seventeenth-century house between us and the nearest lighted ro... |
After that Carter sought a forest pool and cleansed himself
of the mud of nether earth, thereupon reassuming the clothes he had so carefully carried. |
Always
over Kingsport it hung, and always its mystery sounded in whispers through Kingsport’s
crooked alleys. |
The whole is bound by some process not very clear to those who have observed it; a process involving
the adhesion of the leaf substance to the cover substance. |
Carter sailed out of Dylath-Leen one early morning when the tide turned, and
saw the first rays of sunrise on the thin angular towers of that dismal basalt town. |
I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole
wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. |
He was a strange, impressive figure—this stern, fearless leader of his kind
who had talked with outlaws and traders in fringed buckskin and French officials in knee-breeches
and three-cornered hats—and I was glad to see that, because of my air of deference toward
him, he appeared to like me. |
Something fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the
neighbourhood and baffling the police. |
glub-glub.”
I could only assume that the noise was mechanical; but fancying that it might be a case of a
broken instrument able to receive but not to send, I added, “I can’t hear you. |
Wednesday—the next day—he was back at the manuscript, and began to
take copious notes both from the current sections and from those he had already deciphered. |
Another hour and this man would have gone—yet Jones
had seen the symptoms for days before discovering them, and having discovered them, did not
know what to do. |
During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg
dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. |
I had enough
of a smattering of Mexican mythology to make it worth trying; though I would try other delaying
influences first and let the prophecy come as a sudden revelation. |
As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned
some curious dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a sort whose description
would be only too superfluous. |
I was, however, prepared for this; since the sun had at no time formed a gleaming image in the
strange material. |
This time, just as my will power was driving the half-seen paraphernalia
into 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 reason
than anything I had seen before—because I knew what they wer... |
I wonder even now if it could have been other
than a daemoniac dream of delirium. |
Smith went to the extent of some
experimental digging, but was deterred by lack of success—or perhaps by fear of possible
success. |
The strangeness did not
reside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked with
his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the spoken sounds. |
It was, as he deduced too late from things he remembered,
things he dreamed, and things he inferred from the lore of Yaddith, a product of Hyperborea
on earth; with power over the personal consciousness-angles of human beings alone. |
I now debated whether to return to the centre again or whether to try some of the
lateral corridors extending toward the body. |
I expeck them an’ the souls they hunts fer hev some pretty tough tussles sometimes.”
On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned by Wilbur
Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the darkness and telephoned from Osborn’s
in the village. |
Folks all wiped aout, no trace o’ no gold-like things, an’
none o’ the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the matter. |
Upon their departure, another
party would take their place, and so onward in rotation through a group of about fifty members. |
I recall him to have worn a bushy Bob-Wig, untyed and without Powder,
and much too small for his Head. |
As I stared in horror, I thought the eyes took on a reddish glow—and for a moment
the background seemed replaced by an alien and seemingly irrelevant scene—a lone, bleak
moor beneath a dirty yellow sky, whereon grew a wretched-looking blackthorn bush. |
He was clad in dressing-gown and slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an electric
flashlight. |
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